• DOI:10.1101/061408
• Corpus ID: 51755644

Modeling and experimental determination of infection bottleneck and within-host dynamics of a soil-borne bacterial plant pathogen.

@article{Jiang2016ModelingAE,
  title={Modeling and experimental determination of infection bottleneck and within-host dynamics of a soil-borne bacterial plant pathogen.},
  author={Gaofei Jiang and R{\'e}mi Peyraud and Philippe Remigi and Alice Guidot and Wei Ding and St{\'e}phane Genin and Nemo Peeters},
  journal={bioRxiv},
  year={2016},
  pages={061408}
}

• Gaofei Jiang, R. Peyraud, +4 authors N. Peeters
• Published 29 June 2016
• Biology
• bioRxiv

The soil is known to be a very microbe-rich environement. Plant roots are surrounded by a complex microbiota among which, in warm climates, the pathogenic bacteria belonging to the Ralstonia sp. species complex. We used a combination of mathematical modelling and experimental plant infection methods, mimicking the natural conditions, to define the key parameters describing the infection, colonization and wilting of the host plant (bacterial wilt disease). Importantly, our model takes into account the possibility for the orthologous re-infection of already infected plants. We showed that it is the case in our experimental setup and likely to also happen in natura. We were able to model and experimentaly measure the plant infection bottleneck, under these non-forced infection conditions. We then quantified to what extend the plant natural barriers can restrict (up to 50 times) this bottleneck size. We also measured the importance of the bacterial main virulence determinants (type III effectors) to allowing infection, as there is a reduction of the bottleneck by 70 times when the type III arsenal is absent. We further validated the model by predicting a strain caracteristics using only a few experimentally determined parameters. Finally the analysis of the global colonization dynamics allowed an accurate assessment of the in planta bacterial load triggering disease.