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Science 2 September 2005:
Vol. 309. no. 5740, p. 1533
DOI: 10.1126/science.1116841
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Major Biocontrol of Plant Tumors Targets tRNA Synthetase

John S. Reader,1 Phillip T. Ordoukhanian,1 Jung-Gun Kim,2 Valerie de Crécy-Lagard,1 Ingyu Hwang,2 Stephen Farrand,3 Paul Schimmel1*

Crops can be devastated by pathogenic strains of Agrobacterium tumefaciens that cause crown gall tumors. This devastation can be prevented by the nonpathogenic biocontrol agent A. radiobacter K84, which prevents disease by production of the "Trojan horse" toxin agrocin 84, which is specifically imported into tumorgenic A. tumefaciens strains to cause cell death. We demonstrate that this biocontrol agent targets A. tumefaciens leucyl-tRNA synthetase (LeuRS), an essential enzyme for cell viability, while the agent itself survives by having a second, self-protective copy of the synthetase. In principle, this strategy from nature could be applied to other crop diseases by direct intervention.

1 Skaggs Institute for Chemical Biology, The Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla, CA 92037, USA.
2 School of Agricultural Biotechnology, Seoul National University, Seoul 151-921, Korea.
3 Department of Microbiology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL 61801-3838, USA.

* To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: schimmel{at}scripps.edu

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Bases of biocontrol: Sequence predicts synthesis and mode of action of agrocin 84, the Trojan Horse antibiotic that controls crown gall.
J.-G. Kim, B. K. Park, S.-U. Kim, D. Choi, B. H. Nahm, J. S. Moon, J. S. Reader, S. K. Farrand, and I. Hwang (2006)
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