plant surface microbiology.pdf

8 ACC Deaminase-Containing Plant Growth-Promoting Bacteria 141
Currently, many consumers worldwide are reluctant to embrace the use of
genetically modified plants as sources of foods. Thus, for the foreseeable
future it may be advantageous to use either natural or genetically engineered
plant growth-promoting bacteria as a means of lowering plant ethylene levels
rather than genetically modifying the plant itself to achieve the same end.
Moreover, given the large number of different plants, the various cultivars of
those plants and the multiplicity of genes that would need to be introduced
into plants, it is not feasible to genetically engineer all plants to be resistant to
all types of pathogens and environmental stresses. Rather, it makes a lot of
sense to engineer plant growth-promoting bacteria to do this job, and the first
step in this direction could well be the introduction of appropriately regulated
ACC deaminase genes.
Acknowledgements. The work from our laboratory that is described here was supported
by grants from the Natural Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada. We
wish to acknowledge the role of numerous collaborators and students in the work
described here including: Chunxia Wang, Geneviève Défago, Shimon Mayak, Varvara
Grichko, Jiping Li, Mary Robison, Peter Pauls, Saleh Shah, Barbara Moffatt, Genrich Burd,
Seema Nayani, Gina Holguin, Cheryl Patten, Chris Jacobson and Daniel Ovakim. Thanks
are also due to Andrei Belimov for sharing his results prior to their publication.
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