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. Author manuscript; available in PMC: 2019 Apr 1.
Published in final edited form as: Environ Microbiol. 2017 Dec 22;20(4):1330–1349. doi: 10.1111/1462-2920.14020

Figure 1. Bacterial wilt disease changes biological and chemical properties of tomato xylem sap.

Figure 1

(A) “Bonny Best” tomato plants were soil-soak inoculated with R. solanacearum GMI1000. At wilt onset, xylem sap was harvested from infected and healthy plants. (B) Growth of R. solanacearum in filtered sap from R. solanacearum-infected and healthy plants. Data are mean ± SEM (n=3). (C) Xylem sap from healthy plants improves R. solanacearum growth in minimal medium (MM). Vacuum-concentrated sap from healthy plants was added to 1× final concentration to actively growing R. solanacearum cultures. Fresh MM was added to the control (AUC = 13.2 ± 0.087). Data are mean ± SEM (n=3). Area under the curve (AUC) for sap treatment (20.4 ± 0.098) and control treatment (13.2 ± 0.087) were significantly different (P<0.001, t-test). (D-E) Relative chemical composition of xylem sap from healthy and R. solanacearum-infected plants was determined by untargeted GC-MS metabolomics (n=5 pools of sap from 4 plants each). (D) Partial least squares analysis of metabolomics data. Shaded areas indicate 95% confidence regions (n=5). (E) Xylem sap metabolites altered by bacterial wilt disease, fold-change relative to sap from healthy plants (t-test FDR<0.1); bar colors indicate R. solanacearum growth on each metabolite as sole carbon or nitrogen (“N”) source. Strong and moderate growth are defined in Materials & Methods.