Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
Bacteria can serve as the basis for biopesticides and thus fill a need in agriculture to replace certain chemical pesticides with safe and effective alternatives.
This project aimed to understand the genomic and metabolic components responsible for plant pathogen suppression in different bacterial strains that have substantial biological pest control (biocontrol) and plant growth-promoting activities. To better characterize the bacterial genes involved in plant health promotion, the research team evaluated different computational methods to identify novel genes, and then created mutant strains to study in the lab to identify genes involved in pathogen inhibition and plant health promotion. The bacterial strains had been previously shown to effectively enhance yields in different crops. Wild-type strains induce plant host resistance in tomato and pepper to both bacterial and a fungal disease. The team is now comparing mutant to wild-type strains to identify mutants deficient in biocontrol and plant growth-promotion activities. Those mutants will then be analyzed to determine which genes were disrupted, indicating the molecules important for pathogen suppression. The team also used the genome sequences to identify potentially novel genes and clusters of genes that might be co-regulated with genes that are known to be
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