Comparative genomic analysis of three Xanthomonas vesicatoria strains with different degrees of aggressiveness on tomato

PONSO MA; BIANCO MI; GARITA-CAMBRONERO J; CONFORTE VP; DUNGER G; MORALES G; VOJNOV AA; ROMERO AM; YARYURA PM

Los Cocos, Cordoba

Congreso; XVII Congreso Argentino de Microbiología General; 2022

Sociedad Argentina de Microbiología General (SAMIGE)

Xanthomonas vesicatoria (Xv) is a member of a complex of species that causes bacterial spot on tomato (Solanum lycopersicum), a disease that affects different plant crops worldwide causing fruit quality decrease and also loss of entire crop production. In Argentina, bacterial spot is found in all tomato-producing areas, being Xv one of the main species detected in the fields. Currently, little is known about several virulence factors of Xv and it is important to understand them and the mechanism they use to cause disease to forward develop a new strategy to control this disease. Three native strains presenting different aggressiveness degrees on tomato plants were isolated and therefore, sequenced using Illimina HiSeq 2500 platform (2x100bp pair-end reads; coverage 98X). After processing, the novo assembly (MIRA v.4.0) and automatic annotation (Prokka v.1.13.3) was carried out using a specific database available at NCBI. We analyzed groups of genes known to encode for virulence factors in other phytopathogenic Xanthomonas spp., focusing our studies on xanthan and T4P. We did not find differences among the three strains in the gene cluster encoding xanthan production; however, we found differences in T4P related gene cluster. Interestingly, only BNM208 contains a Xac3241-like gene (encoding for one of the major pilin in Xanthomonas citri) and the three strains contain Xac3240-like gene (also pilA in Xanthomonas citri). Structural analysis was performed using the Phyre2 program to predict Xac3241-like and Xac3240-like tridimensional structures. Also, we did multi sequence alignment to identify conserved motifs. Xac3241-like and Xac3240-like showed to have major pilin (PilA) characteristics (similar tertiary structure and a conserved motif). Regarding these results, we hypothesized that these genes could encode for PilA in our strains. Future studies are required to confirm this hypothesis.