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European Journal of Plant Pathology

, Volume 134, Issue 3, pp 551–560 | Cite as

Characterization of pilP, a gene required for twitching motility, pathogenicity, and biofilm formation of Acidovorax avenae subsp. avenae RS-1

  • He Liu
  • Wen-Xiao Tian
  • Muhammad Ibrahim
  • Bin Li
  • Guo-Qing Zhang
  • Bo ZhuEmail author
  • Guan-Lin XieEmail author
Article
First Online:

Abstract

The Gram-negative bacterium Acidovorax avenae subsp. avenae is the causal agent of bacterial brown stripe (BBS), which can cause severe diseases in many plants, including rice, with huge economic importance. Type IV pili (TFP) are hair-like appendages involved in several bacterial activities such as bacterial surface motility, surface adherence, colonization, biofilm formation, and virulence. The aim of our study is to characterize the association of A. avenae subsp. avenae TFP with BBS in rice. We generated a transposon (Tn5) mutant library. Then, an insertional mutagenesis on the background of this bacterium was identified as reduced pathogenicity. The confirmed inserted genetic region was into gene pilP, which encodes a TFP assembly protein. The pilP-deficient mutant strain seriously affected the motility twitching ability, biofilm formation and virulence. Collectively, our results clearly indicated that the pilP gene and TFP in A. avenae subsp. avenae play a key role in plant pathogenicity, twitching motility, and biofilm formation.

Keywords

Acidovorax avanae subspecies avanae Type IV pili Twitching motility Virulence Biofilm formation 
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Notes

Acknowledgement

We extend our thanks to Saul Burdman (Department of Plant Pathology and Microbiology, The Robert H. Smith Faculty of Agriculture, Food and Environment, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Rehovot, Israel) for kindly providing us the suicide vector pJP5603. This work was supported by the Postdoctoral Research Foundation of China (317000-X91102), Special Fund for Agro-scientific Research in the Public Interest (201003029 and 201003066), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (30871655), and Zhejiang Agri. Dep. (Ji-fa 2008-97).

Supplementary material

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© KNPV 2012

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.State Key Laboratory of Rice Biology and Key Laboratory of Molecular Biology of Crop Pathogens and Insects, Institute of BiotechnologyZhejiang UniversityHangzhouChina
  2. 2.State Key Laboratory of Rice Biology and Key Laboratory of Molecular Biology of Crop Pathogens and Insects, Ministry of Agriculture, Institute of BiotechnologyZhejiang UniversityHangzhouChina

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