Inhibition of , Causative Agent of Angular Leaf Spot of Strawberry, through Iron Deprivation.

In commercial production settings, few options exist to prevent or treat angular leaf spot (ALS) of strawberry, a disease of economic importance and caused by the bacterial pathogen . In the process of isolating and identifying bacteria from symptomatic plants, we observed growth inhibition of by bacterial isolates from the same leaf macerates. Identified as species of and , these isolates were confirmed to suppress growth of in agar overlay plates and in microtiter plate cultures, as did our reference strain KT2440.

Leaf microbiota in an agroecosystem: spatiotemporal variation in bacterial community composition on field-grown lettuce.

The presence, size and importance of bacterial communities on plant leaf surfaces are widely appreciated. However, information is scarce regarding their composition and how it changes along geographical and seasonal scales. We collected 106 samples of field-grown Romaine lettuce from commercial production regions in California and Arizona during the 2009-2010 crop cycle.

A PCR-based toolbox for the culture-independent quantification of total bacterial abundances in plant environments.

A major obstacle in the culture-independent estimation of the abundance of bacteria associated with plants is contamination with plant organelles, which precludes the use of universal rRNA bacterial primers in quantitative PCR applications. We present here a PCR-based method that allows a priori determination of the degree of chloroplast and mitochondrial contamination in DNA samples from plant environments. It is based on differential digestibility of chloroplast, mitochondrial and bacterial small subunit rRNA gene amplicons with the restriction enzymes AfeI and BbvCI.