An improved control efficacy against tobacco bacterial wilt by an engineered <i>Pseudomonas mosselii</i> expressing the <i>ripAA</i> gene from phytopathogenic <i>Ralstonia solanacearum</i>

<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title><jats:p>The environmental bacterium <jats:italic>Pseudomonas mosselii</jats:italic> produces antagonistic secondary metabolites with inhibitory effects on multiple plant pathogens, including <jats:italic>Ralstonia solanacearum</jats:italic>, the causal agent of bacterial wilt. In this study, an engineered <jats:italic>P. mosselii</jats:italic> strain was generated to express <jats:italic>R. solanacearum ripAA</jats:italic>, which determines incompatible interactions with tobacco plants. The <jats:italic>ripAA</jats:italic> gene together with its native promoter was integrated into the <jats:italic>P. mosselii</jats:italic> chromosome. The resulting strain showed no difference in antimicrobial activity against <jats:italic>R. solanacearum</jats:italic>. Promoter-LacZ fusion and RT-PCR experiments demonstrated that the <jats:italic>ripAA</jats:italic> gene was transcribed in culture media. Compared with that of the wild type, the engineered strain reduced the disease index by 9.1% for bacterial wilt on tobacco plants. A transcriptome analysis was performed to identify differentially expressed genes in tobacco plants, and the results revealed that ethylene-and jasmonate-dependent defense signaling pathways were induced. These data demonstrated that the engineered <jats:italic>P. mosselii</jats:italic> expressing <jats:italic>ripAA</jats:italic> enables improved biological control against tobacco bacterial wilt by the activation of host defense responses.</jats:p><jats:sec><jats:title>Importance</jats:title><jats:p>Nowadays, the use of biocontrol agents is more and more popular in agriculture, but they cannot replaced of chemical agents mostly, due to the poorer control effect. So the study about how to improve the efficacy of biocontrol agents become necessary and urgent. We increase the efficacy against plant pathogen through introducing an avirulence gene from plant pathogen into the biocontrol agent based on “gene to gene” hypothesis. The new engineered strain can improve the systemic resistance and elicit primary immune response of plants. Our research not only provides a new strategy for genetic modification of biocontrol agent, a number of avirulence gene from pathogen or plant can be tested to be expressed in different biocontrol agents to antagonize plant disease, but also help the study of interaction between phythopathogenic avirulence gene and host.</jats:p></jats:sec>