Abstract:
SUMMARY
Many Gram-negative bacteria use a type III secretion system (T3SS) to establish associations with their hosts.
The T3SS is a conduit for direct injection of type-III effector proteins into host cells, where they manipulate the
host for the benefit of the infecting bacterium. For plant-associated pathogens, the variations in number and
amino acid sequences of type-III effectors, as well as their functional redundancy, make studying type-III
effectors challenging. To mitigate this challenge, we developed a stable delivery system for individual or
defined sets of type-III effectors into plant cells. We used recombineering and Tn5-mediated transposition to
clone and stably integrate, respectively, the complete hrp/hrc region from Pseudomonas syringae pv.
syringae 61 into the genome of the soil bacterium Pseudomonas fluorescens Pf0-1. We describe our
development of Effector-to-Host Analyzer (EtHAn), and demonstrate its utility for studying effectors for their
in planta functions.
