Background: Urinary tract infection (UTI) is one of the most common human bacterial infections. The frequent use of antibiotics is associated with increased resistance of many bacterial agents to the treatment.Materials and Methods: A total of 9456 urine specimens were collected from patients referring to Pol-e Dokhtar health centers. All urine samples were inoculated on blood agar plates...

Microbe-based biocontrol applications hold the potential to become an efficient way to control plant pathogen disease outbreaks in the future. However, their efficiency is still very variable, which could be due to their sensitivity to the abiotic environmental conditions.Here, we assessed how environmental temperature variation correlates with ability of Ralstonia pickettii, an endophytic bact...

Virulence, defined as damage to the host, is a trait of pathogens that evolutionary theory suggests benefits the pathogen in the "struggle for existence". Pathogens employ virulence mechanisms that contribute to disease. Central to the evolution of virulence of the infectious agents causing an array of bacterial disease is the evolutionary acquisition of type III secretion, a macromolecular com...

The Arabidopsis (Arabidopsis thaliana) WRKY7 gene is induced by pathogen infection and salicylic acid (SA) treatment and may therefore play a role in plant defense responses. Here, we show that WRKY7 is localized in the nucleus, recognizes DNA molecules with the W-box (TTGAC) elements, and functions as a transcriptional repressor in plant cells. To study its biological functions directly, we ha...

Innate immunity in plants can be triggered by microbe- and pathogen-associated molecular patterns. The pathogen-associated molecular pattern-triggered immunity (PTI) is often suppressed by pathogen effectors delivered into the host cell. Plants can overcome pathogen suppression of PTI and reestablish pathogen resistance through effector-triggered immunity (ETI). An unanswered question is how pl...

Coxiella burnetii is an intracellular bacterial pathogen that causes human Q fever, an acute flu-like illness that can progress to chronic endocarditis and liver and bone infections. Humans are typically infected by aerosol-mediated transmission, and C. burnetii initially targets alveolar macrophages wherein the pathogen replicates in a phagolysosome-like niche known as the parasitophorous vacu...