Bacterial Pathogens in Plants

Resistance to Bacterial Pathogens in Plants

To successfully infect a plant, pathogens must overcome three layers of defense: (1) preformedphysical barriers; (2) a cell-surface-based surveillance system that detects conserved pathogenmolecules and (3) an intracellular surveillance system that detects effector proteins injected into host cells. Bacterial plant pathogens overcome the first layer either by invading through natural openings a...

Bacterial Pathogens in Plants: Life up against the Wall.

Higher plants contain potentially vast sources of nutrients for the myriad bacterial species in their environment, and most bacteria are small enough to pass through stomates and other natural openingsinto the apoplast-the anteroom for these riches. However, surprisingly few bacteria raid the nutrient stores of living plant cells, apparently because the metabolic intimacy involved in parasitism...

Trypanosome pathogens of plants

A family of lysozyme-like virulence factors in bacterial pathogens of plants and animals.

We describe a conserved family of bacterial gene products that includes the VirB1 virulence factor encoded by tumor-inducing plasmids of Agrobacterium spp., proteins involved in conjugative DNA transfer of broad-host-range bacterial plasmids, and gene products that may be involved in invasion by Shigella spp. and Salmonella enterica. Sequence analysis and structural modeling show that the prote...

Stacking of antimicrobial genes in potato transgenic plants confers increased resistance to bacterial and fungal pathogens.

Solanum tuberosum plants were transformed with three genetic constructions expressing the Nicotiana tabacum AP24 osmotine, Phyllomedusa sauvagii dermaseptin and Gallus gallus lysozyme, and with a double-transgene construction expressing the AP24 and lysozyme sequences. Re-transformation of dermaseptin-transformed plants with the AP24/lysozyme construction allowed selection of plants simultaneou...