The complex biological phenomenon “resistance” can be reduced to single Mendelian traits acting on both the plant and the pathogen side in a number o f pathosystems. According to the “gene-for-gene hypothesis”, the outcome o f a plant/pathogen interaction in these cases is in­ compatibility if a plant carrying a particular resistance gene and a pathogen with the comple­ mentary avirulence gene ...

Plants can acquire enhanced resistance to pathogens after treatment with necrotizing attackers, nonpathogenic root-colonizing pseudomonads, salicylic acid, beta-aminobutyric acid and many other natural or synthetic compounds. The induced resistance is often associated with an enhanced capacity to mobilize infection-induced cellular defence responses - a process called 'priming'. Although the ph...

Infectious diseases are the result of competitive relationships between a host organism and a pathogen. In host vertebrate–microbe interactions, the acquisition of iron for the essential metabolism of pathogenic organisms and the need of the host to bind and sequestrate the metal are central issues. Plants are also confronted with a wide variety of pathogenic microorganisms that can be highly d...

Plant pathogen effectors have now been shown to mimic plant transcription factors and turn on genes that help the pathogen. Some plants, however, have evolved to use these pathogen-derived transcription factors to turn on defence.

Plant diseases caused by pathogenic bacteria or fungi cause major economic damage every year and destroy crop yields that could feed millions of people. Only by a thorough understanding of the interaction between plants and phytopathogens can we hope to develop strategies to avoid or treat the outbreak of large-scale crop pests. Here, we studied the interaction of plant-pathogen pairs at the me...

A draft genome sequence of the plant pathogen Streptomyces acidiscabies 84-104, an emergent plant pathogen, is presented here. The genome is among the largest of streptomycetes, at more than 11 Mb, and encodes a 100-kb pathogenicity island (PAI) shared with other plant-pathogenic streptomycetes. The presence of this conserved PAI, and the remnants of a conserved integrase/recombinase at its 3' ...