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Gac two-component system in Pseudomonas syringae pv. tabaci is required for virulence but not for hypersensitive reaction

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Abstract

Pseudomonas syringae pv. tabaci 6605 causes wildfire disease on host tobacco plants. To investigate the regulatory mechanism of the expression of virulence, Gac two-component system-defective mutants, ΔgacA and ΔgacS, and a double mutant, ΔgacAΔgacS, were generated. These mutants produced smaller amounts of N-acyl homoserine lactones required for quorum sensing, had lost swarming motility, and had reduced expression of virulence-related hrp genes and the algT gene required for exopolysaccharide production. The ability of the mutants to cause disease symptoms in their host tobacco plant was remarkably reduced, while they retained the ability to induce hypersensitive reaction (HR) in the nonhost plants. These results indicated that the Gac two-component system of P. syringae pv. tabaci 6605 is indispensable for virulence on the host plant, but not for HR induction in the nonhost plants.

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Abbreviations

AHLs:

N-Acyl homoserine lactones

HR:

Hypersensitive reaction

HSL:

Homoserine lacton

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Acknowledgments

We thank Prof. T. Ikeda, University of Utsunomiya, Japan, and Prof. P. Williams, University of Nottingham, UK, for the kind gifts of AHLs and C. violaceum (CV026), respectively. We are grateful to Japan Tobacco Inc., Leaf Tobacco Research Laboratory for providing P. syringae pv. tabaci. This work was supported in part by Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research (S) (No. 15108001) from the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology of Japan and by the Okayama University COE program “Establishment of Plant Health Science”.

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Author notes

  1. Mizuri Marutani

    Present address: Department of Plant Pathology, University of Florida, PO Box 110680, Gainesville, FL, 32611-0680, USA

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Laboratory of Plant Pathology and Genetic Engineering, Graduate School of Natural Science and Technology, Okayama University, Tsushima-naka 1-1-1, Okayama, 700-8530, Japan

    Mizuri Marutani, Fumiko Taguchi, Yujiro Ogawa, Md. Mijan Hossain, Yoshishige Inagaki, Kazuhiro Toyoda, Tomonori Shiraishi & Yuki Ichinose

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  1. Mizuri Marutani
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  2. Fumiko Taguchi
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Yuki Ichinose.

Additional information

Communicated by D. Andersson.

The nucleotide sequence data reported in this paper have been submitted to the DDBJ/GenBank/EMBL databank with the accession numbers AB266103, AB266104, AB266105, AB266106, AB266107, AB266108.

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Marutani, M., Taguchi, F., Ogawa, Y. et al. Gac two-component system in Pseudomonas syringae pv. tabaci is required for virulence but not for hypersensitive reaction. Mol Genet Genomics 279, 313–322 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00438-007-0309-y

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