Agrobacterium tumefaciens is a facultative plant pathogen that forms galls on a wide range of hosts and persists in soil, roots and galls through extensive metabolic versatility. Here, we combined genome‐wide transposon sequencing (TnSeq), metabolomics and reverse genetics to identify carbon utilisation pathways supporting A. tumefaciens fitness in tomato roots and galls. TnSeq screening across 21 carbon sources, representativ...

Invasive pathogens can be a threat when they affect human health, food production or ecosystem services, by displacing resident species, and we need to understand the cause of their establishment. We studied the patterns and causes of the establishment of the pathogen Dickeya solani that recently invaded potato agrosystems in Europe by assessing its invasion dynamics and its competitive ability against the closely related resi...

Summary Blackleg and soft rot are devastating diseases on potato stem and tuber caused by Pectobacterium and Dickeya pectinolytic enterobacteria. In European potato cultures, D. dianthicola and D. solani species successively emerged in the past decades. Ecological traits associated to their settlement remain elusive, especially in the case of the recent invader D. solani . In this work, we combined genomic, metabolic and trans...

To investigate how exudation shapes root‐associated bacterial populations, transgenic A rabidopsis thaliana plants that exuded the xenotopic compound octopine at low and high rates were grown in a nonsterile soil. Enumerations of both cultivable and octopine‐degrading bacteria demonstrated that the ratios of octopine degraders increased along with octopine concentration. An artificial exudation system was also set up in which...