Abstract
The phenotypic characteristics and genetic fingerprints of a collection of 120 bacterial strains, belonging to Pseudomonas syringae sensu lato group, P. viridiflava and reference bacteria were evaluated, with the aim of species identification. The numerical analysis of 119 nutritional characteristics did not show patterns that would help with identification. Regarding the genetic fingerprinting, the results of the present study supported the observation that BOX-PCR seems to be able to identify bacterial strains at species level. After numerical analyses of the bar-codes, all pathovars belonging to each one of the nine described genomospecies were clustered together at a distance of 0.72, and could be separated at genomic species level. Two P. syringae strains of unknown pathovars (CFBP 3650 and CFBP 3662) and the three P. syringae pv. actinidiae strains were grouped in two extra clusters and might eventually constitute two new species. This genomic species clustering was particularly evident for genomospecies 4, which gathered P. syringae pvs. atropurpurea, coronafaciens, garçae, oryzae, porri, striafaciens, and zizaniae at a noticeably low distance.
Highlights
Taxonomy of the large bacterial group Pseudomonas syringae (LOPAT I of Lelliott et al, 1966) and P. viridiflava is currently under revision, since nine genomospecies were described (Gardan et al, 1999)
The first cluster contained P. sav. phaseolicola, P. sav. glycinea, P. syr. tabaci, P. syr. mori and P. syr. sesami, all belonging to genomospecies 2, and was distinguishable by two substrates only: sorbitol and meso-tartrate
The second cluster comprised all of the other strains evaluated, i.e. all nine genomospecies including other strains of P. syr. tabaci and other pathovars of genomospecies 2
Summary
Taxonomy of the large bacterial group Pseudomonas syringae (LOPAT I of Lelliott et al, 1966) and P. viridiflava is currently under revision, since nine genomospecies were described (Gardan et al, 1999). Alternative specific genomic fingerprints have been proposed as diagnostic tools (Versalovic et al, 1994; Rademaker and Bruijn, 1997) by means of amplification of interspersed repetitive DNA sequences present in bacterial genomes, referred to as rep-PCR (Rademaker and Bruijn, 1997) or by amplification of random sequences by arbitrary primers, RAPD (Williams et al, 1990). One of these methods appeared interesting for the delineation of species (Onfroy et al, 1999), subspecies (Louws et al, 1998) or pathovars (Louws et al, 1994) for instance. The technique has been used to investigate bacterial inoculum sources (Greco et al, 2004), as a tool for unequivocal identification of strains belonging to a unique pathovar (El Tassa et al, 1999) or to define new species, as a part of a polyphasic approach (Catara et al, 2002)
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