Dataset Information

A single gene that promotes interaction of a phytopathogenic bacterium with its insect vector, Drosophila melanogaster.

ABSTRACT: Insects are major vectors of plant and animal disease, and bacterial phytopathogens are often disseminated by flies. We have previously reported that some isolates of the phytopathogenic bacterial species Erwinia carotovora infect Drosophila and activate an immune response. Using a genetic screen, we have now identified two genes that are required by E. carotovora to infect Drosophila. One of these genes has a regulatory role whereas the other, evf, confers an infectious phenotype: its transfer to non-infectious Erwinia strains or to several enterobacteria improves survival in the gut and triggers the immune response. Overexpression of Erwinia virulence factor (evf) allowed bacteria to colonize the apical side of the gut epithelium and in some cases to spread to the body cavity. Our results demonstrate a specific interaction between plant pathogens and flies that promote their dissemination.

SUBMITTER: Basset A

PROVIDER: S-EPMC1315828 | biostudies-other | 2003 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-other

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A single gene that promotes interaction of a phytopathogenic bacterium with its insect vector, Drosophila melanogaster.

Basset Alan A Tzou Phoebe P Lemaitre Bruno B Boccard Frédéric F

EMBO reports 20030201 2

Insects are major vectors of plant and animal disease, and bacterial phytopathogens are often disseminated by flies. We have previously reported that some isolates of the phytopathogenic bacterial species Erwinia carotovora infect Drosophila and activate an immune response. Using a genetic screen, we have now identified two genes that are required by E. carotovora to infect Drosophila. One of these genes has a regulatory role whereas the other, evf, confers an infectious phenotype: its transfer ...[more]

PMID: 12612613

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Project description:BACKGROUND:While the genomes of hundreds of organisms have been sequenced and good approaches exist for finding protein encoding genes, an important remaining challenge is predicting the functions of the large fraction of genes for which there is no annotation. Large gene expression datasets from microarray experiments already exist and many of these can be used to help assign potential functions to these genes. We have applied Support Vector Machines (SVM), a sigmoid fitting function and a stratified cross-validation approach to analyze a large microarray experiment dataset from Drosophila melanogaster in order to predict possible functions for previously un-annotated genes. A total of approximately 5043 different genes, or about one-third of the predicted genes in the D. melanogaster genome, are represented in the dataset and 1854 (or 37%) of these genes are un-annotated. RESULTS:39 Gene Ontology Biological Process (GO-BP) categories were found with precision value equal or larger than 0.75, when recall was fixed at the 0.4 level. For two of those categories, we have provided additional support for assigning given genes to the category by showing that the majority of transcripts for the genes belonging in a given category have a similar localization pattern during embryogenesis. Additionally, by assessing the predictions using a confidence score, we have been able to provide a putative GO-BP term for 1422 previously un-annotated genes or about 77% of the un-annotated genes represented on the microarray and about 19% of all of the un-annotated genes in the D. melanogaster genome. CONCLUSIONS:Our study successfully employs a number of SVM classifiers, accompanied by detailed calibration and validation techniques, to generate a number of predictions for new annotations for D. melanogaster genes. The applied probabilistic analysis to SVM output improves the interpretability of the prediction results and the objectivity of the validation procedure.

Dataset Information

A single gene that promotes interaction of a phytopathogenic bacterium with its insect vector, Drosophila melanogaster.

Publications

A single gene that promotes interaction of a phytopathogenic bacterium with its insect vector, Drosophila melanogaster.

Similar Datasets

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