Biological Control of Plant Diseases With Bacillus Species

Biocontrol is playing a more and more important role in plant disease management. Evidences show that there are optimum prospects for people to apply biocontrol approach to control plant disease or to study the mechanism of antagonism.“The study of Antagonistic Protein of Bacillus spp.to Xanthomonas oryzae pv. oryzae”has been worked in our laboratory since 1986. One hundred and thirty antagonistics bacteria were screened out, most of them belonged to Bacillus spp., and showed very strong inhibitive effect to various plant pathogens. Nine antagonistic proteins (peptides) were purified (P11-I, P11-II, B8, B826-I, B826-II, A30-I, A30-II, G35). Two antagonistic protein related DNA fragments (B826-I, A30-II) were cloned and sequenced. B826-I DNA fragment composed by 905 bp, and it contained two ORF encoding 95, and 54 amino acids, respectively. By using Rifr and Kamr as the selective markers, we found the bacteria could colonize on rice leaf for at least 40 days. In greenhouse the antagonistic bacteria showed certain degree of control efficiency.