Original Article: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0239998
- A variety of traits are necessary for bacteria to colonize the interior of plant hosts.
- These traits include well-studied virulence effectors as well as other phenotypes contributing to the growth of bacteria and survival within the apoplast.
- Apoplast is the space outside the plasma membrane of a plant cell that allows free movement of material.
- The major virulence strategy for plant bacteria is deployment of effector molecules within the host.
- Effectors suppress immunity by targeting host molecules.
- There are powerful tools that identify such genes in bacterial pathogens.
- However, there is a lack of information as to the distinctiveness of traits required for bacterial colonization of different hosts.
- Researchers identify the genes that contribute to the ability of Pseudomonas syringae strain to grow within common bean, lima bean, and pepper.
- P. syringae is a rod shaped Gram-negative bacteria, with an aerobic metabolism, and polar flagella.
- The magnitude of contribution of most genes to apoplastic fitness in each of the plant hosts was similar.
- However, 50 genes significantly differed in their fitness contributions to growth within these species.
- These genes encoded proteins in various functional categories including polysaccharide synthesis and transport, amino acid metabolism and transport, cofactor metabolism, and phytotoxin synthesis and transport.
- Six other genes that encoded unannotated, hypothetical proteins also contributed differentially to growth in these hosts.
- The genetic collection of a relatively promiscuous pathogen such as P. syringae may thus be shaped, at least in part, by the conditional contribution of some fitness determinants.
Source:
Helmann TC, Deutschbauer AM, Lindow SE (2020) Distinctiveness of genes contributing to growth of Pseudomonas syringae in diverse host plant species. PLoS ONE 15(9): e0239998. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0239998
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20466583/
https://microbewiki.kenyon.edu/index.php/Pseudomonas_syringae
