Bacteriophages and Bacterial Plant Diseases

Bacteriophages and Bacterial Plant Diseases

Losses in crop yields due to disease need to be reduced in order to meet increasing global food demands associated with growth in the human population. There is a well-recognized need to develop new environmentally friendly control strategies to combat bacterial crop disease. Current control measures involving the use of traditional chemicals or antibiotics are losing their efficacy due to the ...

Bacterial ‘immunity’ against bacteriophages

Vertebrate animals possess multiple anti-pathogen defenses. Individual mechanisms usually are differentiated into those that are immunologically adaptive vs. more "primitive" anti-pathogen phenomena described as innate responses. Here I frame defenses used by bacteria against bacteriophages as analogous to these animal immune functions. Included are numerous anti-phage defenses in addition to t...

Bacteriophages for plant disease control.

The use of phages for disease control is a fast expanding area of plant protection with great potential to replace the chemical control measures now prevalent. Phages can be used effectively as part of integrated disease management strategies. The relative ease of preparing phage treatments and low cost of production of these agents make them good candidates for widespread use in developing cou...

Recoding in bacteriophages and bacterial IS elements.

Dynamic shifts between open reading frames and the redefinition of codon meaning at specific sites, programmed by signals in mRNA, permits versatility of gene expression. Such alterations are characteristic of organisms in all domains of life and serve a variety of functional purposes. In this article, we concentrate on programmed ribosomal frameshifting, stop codon read-through and transcripti...

Bacterial and Virus Diseases