Abstract
The popular plant model, Arabidopsis thaliana, has been used to successfully identify novel Pseudomonas aeruginosa genes that are involved in virulence. These genes have also been shown to be important for mammalian infection, demonstrating that this bacterium has a conserved set of virulence factors with broad range. This chapter describes using A. thaliana as a plant model for P. aeruginosa infection and describes obtaining the plants, preparing the inoculum, infecting the leaves, and collecting and interpreting the data. This protocol allows for both a qualitative assessment of symptoms and a quantitative measurement of the bacterial growth inside the leaves.
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Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the NIH grants AI105902 and R56AI063433 to LGR. RLB is partially supported by Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico (CNPq) and the projects in her lab are funded by São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP, www.fapesp.br), Brazil. We thank Jenifer Bush for her critical reading of the methods listed.
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Baldini, R.L., Starkey, M., Rahme, L.G. (2014). Assessing Pseudomonas Virulence with the Nonmammalian Host Model: Arabidopsis thaliana . In: Filloux, A., Ramos, JL. (eds) Pseudomonas Methods and Protocols. Methods in Molecular Biology, vol 1149. Humana, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-0473-0_53
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-0473-0_53
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