BIOLOGICAL CONTROL OF PIERCES DISEASE WITH NON-PATHOGENIC STRAINS OF XYLELLA FASTIDIOSA

• Author(s): Cooksey, Donald; Almeida, Alexander; Newman, Karyn;
• Abstract: Competitive exclusion of plant pathogenic bacteria with nonpathogenic strains has been demonstrated in other systems where pathogens were excluded from either plant surfaces or vascular tissues. The ideal situation is where the nonpathogenic bacteria are stable derivatives of the pathogen itself, so that nutritional and other growth requirements are identical and thus facilitate successful competition for colonization. Our project is to construct such mutants from the Pierces disease (PD) pathogen, Xylella fastidiosa, through a systematic process of identifying which virulence genes are important for disease expression but not essential for colonization of plants in a nonpathogenic state. We are utilizing knowledge from comparative genomic sequence analysis with mutational studies to identify important virulence genes. This year, we have begun to employ an additional strategy (DNA macro/microarrays) based on analysis of differential gene expression between the bacterium grown in culture vs. during infection of plants.
• Publication Date: Dec 2002
• Journal: 2002 Pierce's Disease Research Symposium