Abstract
Bacteria in the genus Xanthomonas infect a wide range of crops and wild plants, with most species responsible for plant diseases that have a global economic and environmental impact on the seed, plant, and food trade. Infections by Xanthomonas spp. cause a wide variety of non-specific symptoms, making their identification difficult. The coexistence of phylogenetically close strains, but drastically different in their phenotype, poses an added challenge to diagnosis. Data on future climate change scenarios predict an increase in the severity of epidemics and a geographical expansion of pathogens, increasing pressure on plant health services. In this context, the effectiveness of integrated disease management strategies strongly depends on the availability of rapid, sensitive, and specific diagnostic methods. The accumulation of genomic information in recent years has facilitated the identification of new DNA markers, a cornerstone for the development of more sensitive and specific methods. Nevertheless, the challenges that the taxonomic complexity of this genus represents in terms of diagnosis together with the fact that within the same bacterial species, groups of strains may interact with distinct host species demonstrate that there is still a long way to go. In this review, we describe and discuss the current molecular-based methods for the diagnosis and detection of regulated Xanthomonas, taxonomic and diversity studies in Xanthomonas and genomic approaches for molecular diagnosis.
Highlights
The genus Xanthomonas was created by Dowson in 1939 to gather Gram-negative rods, forming yellow colonies, that are motile by the means of a single polar flagellum
As for other pest diagnostic protocols, Xanthomonas spp. protocols include a description of symptoms, sampling procedures of plants and plant products, methods for detecting the pest in a commodity, methods for extracting, isolating, identifying the pest from plant tissues, as well as sources to confirm its pathogenicity on host plants (Table S1)
Molecular methods caused a significant shift in the approaches to the detection, identification and diversity studies of plant pathogenic xanthomonads and overall have led to the development of more reliable disease management strategies
Summary
The genus Xanthomonas was created by Dowson in 1939 to gather Gram-negative rods, forming yellow colonies, that are motile by the means of a single polar flagellum. Xanthomonas spp. cause a large range of symptoms that in some cases are not distinguishable from those caused by other pathogenic bacteria on the same host plants and include water-soaked spots evolving into necrosis on leaves, wilting, rotting, hypertrophy, hyperplasia, blights, dieback, and cankers [38]. In this context, the development and standardization of detection and diagnostic methods, as well as the knowledge of their diversity, are of utmost importance to fully understand the multidimensional nature of Xanthomonas and to implement effective containment and control measures. This work is the collective effort of the “Working Group 1: Diagnostics & Diversity–Population Structure” from ‘EuroXanth’ COST Action CA16107
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