Huanglongbing (HLB) or citrus greening disease is a destructive disease of citrus worldwide, which is associated with Candidatus Liberibacter asiaticus. This phloem-limited fastidious pathogen is transmitted by the Asian citrus psyllid, Diaphorina citri, and appears to be an intracellular pathogen that maintains an intimate association with the psyllid or the plant throughout its life cycle. Th...

Lasiodiplodia theobromae is a fungal pathogen associated with perennial tropical fruit plants worldwide. In citrus, L. causes stem-end rot (Diplodia rot), damaging postharvest disease that aggravated when trees are also infected the citrus greening bacteria ‘Candidatus Liberibacter asiaticus’. Due to latent infection of during preharvest stage, it becomes difficult control by chemical or physic...

Huanglongbing (HLB) presumably caused by Candidatus Liberibacter asiaticus (CLas) threatens the commercial U.S. citrus crop of an annual value of $3 billion. The earliest shift in metabolite profiles of leaves from greenhouse-grown sweet orange trees infected with Clas, and of healthy leaves, was characterized by HPLC-MS concurrently with PCR testing for the presence of Clas bacteria and observ...

This study reports the development of a loop-mediated isothermal amplification procedure (LAMP) for polymerase chain reaction (PCR)-based detection of 'Candidatus Liberibacter solanacearum', the bacterial causal agent of potato zebra chip (ZC) disease. The 16S rDNA gene of 'Ca. Liberibacter solanacearum' was used to design a set of six primers for LAMP PCR detection of the bacterial pathogen in...

Candidatus Liberibacter asiaticus (CLas) is a phloem-limited, gram-negative, fastidious bacterium that is associated with the development of citrus greening disease, also known as Huanglongbing (HLB). CLas is transmitted by the Asian citrus psyllid (ACP) Diaphorina citri, in a circulative manner. Two major barriers to transmission within the insect are the midgut and the salivary glands. We per...

Sinorhizobium meliloti strain 1021, a nitrogen-fixing, root-nodulating bacterial microsymbiont of alfalfa, has a 3.5 Mbp circular chromosome and two megaplasmids including 1.3 Mbp pSymA carrying nonessential 'accessory' genes for nitrogen fixation (nif), nodulation and host specificity (nod). A related bacterium, psyllid-vectored 'Ca. Liberibacter asiaticus,' is an obligate phytopathogen with a...

Huanglongbing (HLB), an insect-transmitted disease of citrus, known for many years in Asia and Africa, has appeared in the state of São Paulo State (SSP), Brazil, in 2004, and the state of Florida, USA, in 2005. HLB endangers the very existence of citrus, as trees infected with the bacterial pathogen, irrevocably decline. In the absence of curative procedures, control of HLB is difficult and on...

Zebra Chip (ZC) is an emerging plant disease that causes aboveground decline of potato shoots and generally results in unusable tubers. This disease has led to multi-million dollar losses for growers in the central and western United States over the past decade and impacts the livelihood of potato farmers in Mexico and New Zealand. ZC is associated with 'Candidatus Liberibacter solanacearum', a...

Candidatus Liberibacter asiaticus "Las" is a phloem-limited bacterial plant pathogen, and the most prevalent species of Liberibacter associated with citrus huanglongbing (HLB), a devastating disease of citrus worldwide. Although, the complete sequence of the Las genome provides the basis for studying functional genomics of Las and molecular mechanisms of Las-plant interactions, the functional c...