Mycobacterium tuberculosis has a penetrance of its host population that would be the envy of most human pathogens. About one-third of the human population would have a positive skin test for the infection and is thus thought to harbor the bacterium. Globally, 22 "high-burden" countries account for more than 80% of the active tuberculosis cases in the world, which shows the inequitable distribut...

Five levels of disease expression were scored in a cross-inoculation study of 120 host and 60 pathogen lines of wild flax Linum marginale and its rust fungus Melampsora lini sampled from six natural populations. Patterns of partial resistance showed clear evidence of gene-for-gene interactions, with particular levels of partial resistance occurring in specific host-pathogen combinations. Sympat...

Acinetobacter baumannii is a Gram-negative nosocomial pathogen that has become a serious healthcare concern within a span of two decades due to its ability to rapidly acquire resistance to all classes of antimicrobial compounds. One of the key features of the A. baumannii genome is an open pan genome with a plethora of plasmids, transposons, integrons, and genomic islands, all of which play imp...

Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) is a major nosocomial pathogen. We sought to determine the frequency of the different types of SCCmec in MRSA isolates by performing a cross-sectional study. A total of 72 S. aureus isolates were collected from Imam Khomeini and Golestan hospitals and analysed for MRSA and SCCmec typing by multiplex PCR. The pattern of antibiotic resistance amo...

Depending on host-pathotype combination, two types of sunflower-Plasmopara halstedii incompatibility reactions have previously been identified. Type I resistance can restrict the growth of the pathogen in the basal region of the hypocotyls, whereas type II cannot, thus allowing the pathogen to reach the cotyledons. In type II resistance, a large portion of the hypocotyls is invaded by the patho...

fire blight, caused by the bacterium erwinia amylovora, is one of the most destructive diseases of plants in the rosaceae subfamily pomoideae. the objective of this study was to determine the level of resistance of 30 pear cultivars and describe the biochemical changes induced in some resistant and susceptible cultivars. the level of resistance was determined by the length of the fire blight le...

Quantitative plant disease resistance is believed to be more durable than qualitative resistance, since it exerts less selective pressure on the pathogens. However, the process of progressive pathogen adaptation to quantitative resistance is poorly understood, which makes it difficult to predict its durability or to derive principles for its sustainable deployment. Here, we study the dynamics o...

Properties encompassed by host-pathogen interaction networks have potential to give valuable insight into the evolution of specialization and coevolutionary dynamics in host-pathogen interactions. However, network approaches have been rarely utilized in previous studies of host and pathogen phenotypic variation. Here we applied quantitative analyses to eight networks derived from spatially and ...

Quantitative resistance is likely to be more durable than major gene resistance for controlling Septoria tritici blotch (STB) on wheat. Earlier studies hypothesized that resistance affecting the degree of host damage, as measured by the percentage of leaf area covered by STB lesions, is distinct from resistance that affects pathogen reproduction, as measured by the density of pycnidia produced ...