Xenorhabdus is a bacterial symbiont of entomopathogenic Steinernema nematodes and is pathogenic for insects. Its life cycle involves a stage inside the insect cadaver, in which it competes for environmental resources with microorganisms from soil and the insect gut. Xenorhabdus is, thus, a useful model for identifying new interbacterial competition systems. For the first time, in an entomopatho...

An antimicrobial peptide (AMP) of the cecropin family was isolated by HPLC from plasma of the insect pest, Spodoptera frugiperda. Its molecular mass is 3910.9 Da as determined by mass spectrometry. Thanks to the EST database Spodobase, we were able to describe 13 cDNAs encoding six different cecropins which belong to the sub-families CecA, CecB, CecC and CecD. The purified peptide identified as...

Bacteria of the genus Xenorhabdus are symbionts of soil entomopathogenic nematodes of the genus Steinernema. This symbiotic association constitutes an insecticidal complex active against a wide range of insect pests. Within Xenorhabdus bovienii species, the X. bovienii CS03 strain (Xb CS03) is nonvirulent when directly injected into lepidopteran insects, and displays a low virulence when associ...

Precise and fluent genetic manipulation is still limited to only a few prokaryotes. Ideally the highly advanced technologies available in Escherichia coli could be broadly applied. Our efforts to apply lambda Red technology, widely termed 'recombineering', in Photorhabdus and Xenorhabdus yielded only limited success. Consequently we explored the properties of an endogenous Photorhabdus luminesc...

We present results from epifluorescence, differential interference contrast, and transmission electron microscopy showing that Xenorhabdus nematophila colonizes a receptacle in the anterior intestine of the infective juvenile (IJ) stage of Steinernema carpocapsae. This region is connected to the esophagus at the esophagointestinal junction. The process by which X. nematophila leaves this bacter...

Xenorhabdus and Photorhabdus are gram-negative bacteria that produce a range of proteins that are toxic to insects. We recently identified a novel 42-kDa protein from Xenorhabdus nematophila that was lethal to the larvae of insects such as Galleria mellonella and Helicoverpa armigera when it was injected at doses of 30 to 40 ng/g larvae. In the present work, the toxin gene txp40 was identified ...

Xenorhabdus nematophila, an entomopathogenic bacterium that symbiotically associates with the entomoparasitic nematode Steinernema carpocapsae, was studied to determine its physiological parameters of glucose utilization. X. nematophila was cultured in chemically defined media containing various concentrations of glucose under optimal conditions utilizing a two-liter fermentation system. Specif...

We report the 4.3-Mb genome sequence of Xenorhabdus nematophila strain F1, a Gram-negative bacterium that is a symbiont of the entomopathogenic nematode Steinernema carpocapsae and pathogenic by direct injection for a wide variety of insects.

We report here the draft genome sequence of Xenorhabdus khoisanae strain MCB, a Gram-negative bacterium and symbiont of a Steinernema entomopathogenic nematode. The genome assembly consists of 266 contigs covering 4.68 Mb. Genome annotation revealed 3,869 protein-coding sequences, with a G+C content of 43.5%.