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Members of the Jacob’s lab traveled to Clearwater, Florida to attend the Xanthomonas Genomics Conference in June 2022. Jonathan Jacobs, Veronica Roman-Reyna, Marcus Vinicius Merfa, Yesenia Velez-Negron, Nate Heiden, and Taylor Klass gave oral or poster presentations while there. A few of those presentations are highlighted below.

Marcus gave his oral presentation titled: Dialects or languages? Xanthomonas communication across the genus.

In this study, Marcus and the team are assessing the evolution of quorum sensing communication among Xanthomonas spp. and its impact in leaf colonization

Taylor gave her oral presentation titled: Metagenomic Sequencing for Tomato and Pepper Bacterial Spot Diagnostics.

Her presentation focused on her work and lab’s work to develop metagenomic sequencing (MGS) for plant disease diagnostics.

Yesenia gave her oral presentation titled: Visualiztion of Xanthomonas translucens  barley host cell targeting by Type III effectors.

 

Those who were present at XGC 2022 were happy to be at in-person conferences again, make connections with other researchers, and seeing old friends.

Great job team on all your hardwork!

Dr. Vero Roman-Reyna (postdoc in the team) won a travel award and will give an oral presentation at the World Microbe Forum (2021 ASM Microbe joint meeting with FEMS). This is really exciting for our lab present at this global meeting. She will present on exciting research about using metagenome sequencing for diagnostics of Xylella fastidiosa, an endemic US pathogen and one of emerging importance in Europe.

Taylor Klass, PhD student in the team, presented in the Infectious Disease Institute’s Work in Progress symposium on April 15th, 2021. This forum lets students share unpublished projects currently in progress.

Awesome job Taylor!

We are excited to share our recent work about the evolution of tissue-specificity in plant pathogenic bacteria from multiple genera. This collaborative research (Gluck-Thaler et al. 2020 Science Advances) discovered a single gene that acts as a switch for vascular and non-vascular pathogenesis.

 

Photo credit: T. Meulia (Ohio State MCIC)/J. Jacobs

2020 was a challenging year, but we took this time to achieve some small goals. We worked with collaborators from Colorado, France and PacBio to provide whole genome sequences to the community for understudied Xanthomonas pathogens.

Xanthomonas translucens pv. translucens UPB886 (bacterial leaf streak and blight of barley)

Xanthomonas hyacinthi CFBP 1156 (yellow disease of hyacinth)

Xanthomonas theicola CFBP 4691 (bacterial canker of tea plants)

Drs. Verónica Roman-Reyna and Stephen Cohen, two postdocs in the team, led these projects.

We like to have fun.

Excited to share our recent publication in Plant Disease describing X. hortorum on peony. We collaborated with Prof. Francesca Hand and the OSU Ornamental Pathology lab to use traditional plant pathology and Next Generation sequencing approaches to diagnose bacterial blight of peony in Ohio.

X. hortorum on peony appears to be a nationwide issue and was first reported in the US in Virginia. Keep an eye on what we are doing to improve diagnostics for Ohio ornamental producers!

Mariama Carter, a PhD candidate from Prof. Caitilyn Allen’s group at UW-Madison, came to our lab to learn imaging bacterial cells on plant surfaces. Excited to share our imaging and videos in the near future!

Our first paper of 2019 titled “A Pathovar of Xanthomonas oryzae Infecting Wild Grasses Provides Insight Into the Evolution of Pathogenicity in Rice Agroecosystems” was published in Frontiers in Plant Science. Our colleagues in CO (Lang et al.) from the Leach lab led the effort and explored the biology of X. oryzae of weedy hosts that are closely related to important rice pathogens.

Welcome to the Jacobs lab! After finally creating a website, we hope to keep you up to date with what’s going on in Ohio.

The Jacobs lab investigates the biological and evolutionary basis for microbial colonization of plants. The factors that contribute to pathogen evolution for niche-specific behavior remain unclear. Dr. Jacobs’ team focuses on understanding how pathogenic bacteria evolve and adapt to colonize different plant tissues. Their research uses novel, high-throughput technologies to determine the basis of tissue-specific behaviors in and host colonization by plant pathogenic bacteria.

 

Image: Live imaging of bacterial transcriptional reprogramming of a plant cell