1887

Abstract

species are an important source of agar. The South African industry has experienced a number of setbacks over the last decade in the form of complete or partial die-offs of the agarophyte growing in Saldanha Bay, which may be attributed to bacterial infection. Since a positive correlation was observed between the presence of agarolytic epiphytes and bacterial pathogenicity, we investigated the role of an agarase in the virulence mechanism employed by a bacterium that elicits disease in . The recombinant plasmid pDA1, isolated from a B9 genomic library, was responsible for the agarolytic activity exhibited by transformants when grown on solid medium. A search of the GenBank database showed that an 873 bp ORF () located on pDA1 had 85 % identity to the -agarase () from ATCC 19262 (or IAM 12927) at the amino acid level. AagA was purified from the extracellular medium of an transformant harbouring pDA1 by using a combination of gel filtration and ion-exchange chromatography. AagA has an of 30 000 on SDS-PAGE. TLC of the digestion products of AagA showed that the enzyme cleaves the -(1,4) linkages of agarose to yield predominately neoagarotetraose. Western hybridization confirmed that the cloned agarase was in fact the extracellular -agarase of B9. The observed relationship between disease symptoms of and the agarolytic phenotype of B9 was confirmed. Transmission electron microscope examination of cross sections of both healthy and infected with , revealed a weakening of the cell structure in the latter plants. Immunogold-labelled antibodies localized the agarase to the cell walls of bleached . Thus, the weakening observed in the cell structure of infected with can be attributed to degradation of the mucilaginous component of the cell wall of the bleached thalli.

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2003-10-01
2024-03-29
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