Pantoea ananatis is ubiquitously found in the environment and causes disease on a wide range of plant hosts. By contrast, its sister species, Pantoea stewartii subsp. stewartii is the host-specific causative agent of the devastating maize disease Stewart's wilt. This pathogen has a restricted lifecycle, overwintering in an insect vector before being introduced into susceptible maize cultivars, ...

The phytopathogen Pantoea stewartii subsp. stewartii DC283 causes Stewart's wilt disease in corn after transmission from the corn flea beetle insect vector. Here, we report that the complete annotated genome of P. stewartii DC283 has been fully assembled into one circular chromosome, 10 circular plasmids, and one linear phage.

Pantoea stewartii subsp. stewartii, the causal agent of Stewart's wilt of sweet corn, produces a yellow carotenoid pigment. A nonpigmented mutant was selected from a bank of mutants generated by random transposon mutagenesis. The transposon insertion site was mapped to the crtB gene, encoding a putative phytoene synthase, an enzyme involved in the early steps of carotenoid biosynthesis. We demo...

Plant- and animal-pathogenic bacteria utilize phylogenetically distinct type III secretion systems (T3SS) that produce needle-like injectisomes or pili for the delivery of effector proteins into host cells. Pantoea stewartii subsp. stewartii (herein referred to as P. stewartii), the causative agent of Stewart's bacterial wilt and leaf blight of maize, carries phylogenetically distinct T3SSs. In...

The production of the main virulence determinants of the plant pathogen Erwinia carotovora subsp. carotovora, the extracellular cell wall-degrading enzymes, is partly controlled by the diffusible signal molecule N-(3-oxohexanoyl)-L-homoserine lactone (OHHL). OHHL is synthesized by the product of the expI/carI gene. Linked to expI we found a gene encoding a putative transcriptional regulator of ...