In this issue of Applied and Environmental Microbiology (AEM), we publish a paper by Fenghuan Yang, Fang Tian, Huamin Chen, William Hutchins, Ching-Hong Yang, and Chenyang He from the State Key Laboratory for Biology of Plant Diseases and Insect Pests at the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences and the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Wisconsin—Milwaukee, reporting on ...

pyricularia oryzae (tel. magnaporthegrisea) is currently used as a fungal model for plantmicrobeinteraction studies as well as an indicative model for anticancer drug discovery. thepresent study introduces the optimal condition in which p. oryzae grows and sporulates beston common culture media. we have considered three fungal culture media, i.e. pda, pca andwa, based on which p. oryzae sporula...

The areA gene of Aspergillus oryzae was cloned by cross-hybridization with the Aspergillus nidulans areA gene and was found to encode an 866-amino-acid protein that is very similar to other fungal nitrogen regulatory proteins. The A. oryzae areA gene can complement A. nidulans areA loss-of-function mutations. Functional analyses indicated that the N-terminal region of the A. oryzae AreA protein...

Broad-spectrum disease resistance against two or more types of pathogen species is desirable for crop improvement. In rice, Xanthomonas oryzae pv. oryzae (Xoo), the causal bacteria of rice leaf blight, and Magnaporthe oryzae, the fungal pathogen causing rice blast, are two of the most devastating pathogens. We identified the rice BROAD-SPECTRUM RESISTANCE 1 (BSR1) gene for a BIK1-like receptor-...

Xanthomonas oryzae pv. oryzae, the causal agent of bacterial leaf blight in rice, contains a regulator that is encoded in the genome, designated OryR, which belongs to the N-acyl homoserine lactone (AHL)-dependent quorum-sensing LuxR subfamily of proteins. However, we previously reported that X. oryzae pv. oryzae does not make AHLs and does not possess a LuxI-family AHL synthase and that the Or...

Breeding crops with the quality of broad-spectrum disease resistance using genetic resources is one of the principal goals of crop improvement. However, the molecular mechanism of broad-spectrum resistance remains largely unknown. Here, we show that GH3-2, encoding an indole-3-acetic acid (IAA)-amido synthetase, mediates a broad-spectrum resistance to bacterial Xanthomonas oryzae pv oryzae and ...

Rice blast disease, caused by the fungus Pyricularia oryzae, is one of the most devastating diseases of rice. Understanding pathogenic variation and molecular characterization of P. oryzae is one of the most efficient ways to manage the disease. Studies on identification, characterization and pathogenic variation of P. oryzae were conducted in the laboratory and screen-house at Sokoine Universi...

We have cloned a genomic DNA sequence encoding the acid protease (PEPA) from Aspergillus oryzae using a 0.6-kb fragment as a probe. This fragment was amplified by the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) using oligonucleotide primers designed from the partial amino acid sequences of peptide fragments of the purified protein. Nucleotide sequencing analysis has shown that the cloned gene (designated p...

The phytopathogenic prokaryote Xanthomonas oryzae pv. oryzae is the causal agent of bacterial leaf blight (BB) of rice and utilizes a type III secretion system (T3SS) to deliver T3SS effectors into rice cells. In this report, we show that the ketoglutarate transport protein (KgtP) is secreted in an HpaB-independent manner through the T3SS of X. oryzae pv. oryzae PXO99(A) and localizes to the ho...