So far, genetic engineering of plants in the context of insect pest control has involved insertion of genes that code for toxins, and may be characterized as the incorporation of biopesticides into classical plant breeding. In the context of pesticide usage in pest control, natural enemies of herbivores have received increasing attention, because carnivorous arthropods are an important componen...

Pseudomonas syringae is a phytopathogenic bacterium present in a wide variety of host plants where it causes diseases with economic impact. The symptoms produced by Pseudomonas syringae include chlorosis and necrosis of plant tissues, which are caused, in part, by antimetabolite toxins. This category of toxins, which includes tabtoxin, phaseolotoxin and mangotoxin, is produced by different path...

Shiga toxins and ricin are well characterized similar toxins belonging to quite different biological kingdoms. Plant and bacteria have evolved the ability to produce these powerful toxins in parallel, while humans have evolved a defense system that recognizes molecular patterns common to foreign molecules through specific receptors expressed on the surface of the main actors of innate immunity,...

To inhibit protein synthesis and induce cell death, plant ricin toxin and bacterial Shiga toxins enter the cell through the endocytic and retrograde secretory pathways. Stechmann et al. (2010) now identify two small-molecule inhibitors that selectively block endosome-to-Golgi retrieval of ricin and Shiga toxins and protect mice from ricin's deadly effects.

Pathogenic fungi and bacteria often damage their host (plants) tissues by producing toxic metabolites, which induced various symptoms such as necrosis, chlorosis, wilting, water soaking and eventually the death of plants. These toxic metabolites also known is one of the weapons used by pathogen inducing disease condition in susceptible host plants. Many pathogens are known to produce toxins bot...

Summary Host-selective toxins are known determinants of compatibility in plant-fungus interactions and provide a powerful model for understanding the specificity of these associations. The identification of genes required for toxin biosynthesis has shown that the genes are unique to the toxin producing species and are clustered in complex loci. These loci may have been acquired by horizontal ge...

Plant-parasitic nematodes are the most destructive group of plant pathogens worldwide and are extremely challenging to control. Some Bacillus thuringiensis crystal proteins are highly toxic to the plant-parasitic nematode Meloidogyne incognita. In this study, the nematicidal crystal proteins Cry6Aa, Cry5Ba and Cry55Aa were tested against M. incognita to select the best toxin combination for its...

abrin known as ribosome inactivating protein’s (rip) it is a high cytotoxic plant protein. high lethality and low cost and easy access to plant and seeds lead to this toxin used in crimes and terrorist acts. because obtaining purified toxins requires advanced laboratory equipment and complex procedures, so, it appears that the perpetrators of such crimes use crude extracts. as a result, remaini...