Department of Plant Pathology, Physiology, & Weed Science, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, Virginia, USA.
mBio. 2012 Sep 11;3(5):e00269-12. doi: 10.1128/mBio.00269-12. Print 2012.
Bacteria that infect the plant vascular system are among the most destructive kind of plant pathogens because pathogen proliferation in the vascular system will sooner or later shut down the plant's water and nutrient supply and necessarily lead to wilting and, in the worst case, death of the entire plant. How bacterial plant pathogens adapted to life in the plant vascular system is still poorly understood. As described in a recent article, Caitilyn Allen and her group studied the archetypical vascular pathogen Ralstonia solanacearum, the causative agent of bacterial wilt disease in almost 200 crop and ornamental plant species, and they have described the results of a microarray analysis that allowed them to "listen in" on the pathogen's sabotaging activity inside the plant [J. M. Jacobs et al., mBio 3(4):e00114-12, 2012]. Besides gaining for the first time an almost complete picture of R. solanacearum gene expression during infection, this approach allowed revision of a wrong assumption about the activity of the pathogen's type III secretion system during infection and uncovered the importance of sucrose as an energy source for vascular pathogens like R. solanacearum.
感染植物维管束系统的细菌是最具破坏性的植物病原体之一，因为病原体在维管束系统中的增殖迟早会切断植物的水和养分供应，从而不可避免地导致萎蔫，在最坏的情况下，导致整个植物死亡。细菌植物病原体如何适应植物维管束系统中的生活仍然知之甚少。正如最近一篇文章所描述的，Caitilyn Allen 及其团队研究了典型的血管病原体茄青枯雷尔氏菌，它是近 200 种作物和观赏植物物种细菌性萎蔫病的病原体，他们描述了微阵列分析的结果，这些结果使他们能够“监听”病原体在植物内部的破坏活动[J. M. Jacobs 等人，mBio 3(4):e00114-12, 2012]。除了首次获得茄青枯雷尔氏菌感染过程中基因表达的几乎完整图像外，这种方法还修正了关于病原体 III 型分泌系统在感染过程中活性的错误假设，并揭示了蔗糖作为像茄青枯雷尔氏菌这样的血管病原体的能量来源的重要性。
