Selective inhibition of Erwinia amylovora by the herbicidally active germination-arrest factor (GAF) produced by Pseudomonas bacteria.

AIMS: The germination-arrest factor (GAF) produced by Pseudomonas fluorescens WH6, and identified as 4-formylaminooxyvinylglycine, specifically inhibits the germination of a wide range of grassy weeds. This study was undertaken to determine whether GAF has antimicrobial activity in addition to its inhibitory effects on grass seed germination. METHODS AND RESULTS: Culture filtrate from Ps. fluorescens WH6 had little or no effect on 17 species of bacteria grown in Petri dish lawns, but the in vitro growth of Erwinia amylovora, the causal agent of the disease of orchard crops known as fire blight, was strongly inhibited by the filtrate. The anti-Erwinia activity of WH6 culture filtrate was shown to be due to its GAF content, and a commercially available oxyvinylglycine, 4-aminoethoxyvinylglycine (AVG), exhibited anti-Erwinia activity similar to that of GAF. The effects of GAF on Erwinia were reversed by particular amino acids. CONCLUSIONS: The biological properties of GAF include a rather specific antimicrobial activity against Erw. amylovora. This may be a general property of oxyvinylglycines as AVG exhibited similar activity. The ability of particular amino acids to reverse GAF inhibition is consistent with a potential effect of this compound on the activity of aminotransferases. SIGNIFICANCE AND IMPACT OF THE STUDY: The results presented here demonstrate a novel antimicrobial activity of oxyvinylglycines and suggest that GAF and/or GAF-producing bacteria may have potential for the control of fire blight.

Loss of heterozygosity at the Ink4a/Arf locus facilitates Abelson virus transformation of pre-B cells.

In many tumor systems, analysis of cells for loss of heterozygosity (LOH) has helped to clarify the role of tumor suppressor genes in oncogenesis. Two important tumor suppressor genes, p53 and the Ink4a/Arf locus, play central roles in the multistep process of Abelson murine leukemia virus (Ab-MLV) transformation. p53 and the p53 regulatory protein, p19Arf, are required for the apoptotic crisis that characterizes the progression of primary transformed pre-B cells to fully malignant cell lines. To search for other tumor suppressor genes which may be involved in the Ab-MLV transformation process, we used endogenous proviral markers and simple-sequence length polymorphism analysis to screen Abelson virus-transformed pre-B cells for evidence of LOH. Our survey reinforces the role of the p53-p19 regulatory pathway in transformation; 6 of 58 cell lines tested had lost sequences on mouse chromosome 4, including the Ink4a/Arf locus. Consistent with this pattern, a high frequency of primary pre-B-cell transformants derived from Ink4a/Arf +/- mice became established cell lines. In addition, half of them retained the single copy of the locus when the transformation process was complete. These data demonstrate that a single copy of the Ink4a/Arf locus is not sufficient to fully mediate the effects of these genes on transformation.