For most of Texas, Pierce’s disease (PD) is the greatest limiting factor in cultivating Vitis vinifera and most hybrid wine grapes.Widespread death of wine grapes has been a common occurrence in Texas since the first introduction of old-world varieties brought by European settlers over four hundred years ago. Although the scientific knowledge of Pierce’s disease has grown significantly in recen...

Pierce’s disease (PD), a lethal disease of grapevine, is caused by Xylella fastidiosa, a Gram-negative, xylem-limited bacterium, transmitted from plant to plant by xylem feeding insects.1 Strains of X. fastidiosa have also been associated with diseases that cause tremendous losses in many other economically important plants including citrus.2 Although the complete genome sequence of X. fastidio...

Xylella fastidiosa possesses both type I and type IV pili at the same cell pole. By use of a microfluidic device, the speed of twitching movement by wild-type cells on a glass surface against the flow direction of media was measured as 0.86 (standard error [SE], 0.04) microm min(-1). A type I pilus mutant (fimA) moved six times faster (4.85 [SE, 0.27] microm min(-1)) and a pilY1 mutant moved th...

A problem in many sequencing projects is the final closure of gaps left in the clone libraries, which serve as templates for sequencing, because of uncloned or unclonable genomic areas. By use of the Xylella fastidiosa genome as a test system, we present here an approach to generate, in a directed manner, sequence information from those gaps. We suggest using the complete clone library as a com...

Bacterial leaf scorch is caused by Xylella fastidiosa Wells et al. The pathogen causes chronic leaf scorch and decline in elm, oak, sycamore, and maple. X. fastidiosa has a wide host range and is responsible for many other serious diseases including Pierce's disease of grape, phony disease of peach, and citrus variegated chlorosis. Its role in shade tree disorders has only recently been recogni...

A genome-wide search was performed to identify simple sequence repeat (SSR) loci among the available sequence databases from four strains of Xylella fastidiosa (strains causing Pierce's disease, citrus variegated chlorosis, almond leaf scorch, and oleander leaf scorch). Thirty-four SSR loci were selected for SSR primer design and were validated in PCR experiments. These multilocus SSR primers, ...