Session: General Posters:

Ralstonia solanacearum is one of the most lethal phytopathogens in the world. Due to its numerous strains, this gram-negative pathogen can attack and damage more than 200 plant species and 33 different plant families across the world. As a soil-borne pathogen, fields that have been infected by R. solanacearum are rarely able to be reused after infection and currently, there are minimal antibiotics or preventive options to help contain the spread. The ineffectiveness of existing antibiotics and harmful effect of broad-spectrum agents on the composition of host and soil microbiomes supports the need to develop new approaches that interfere with the virulence of R. solanacearum. Ralstonia’s glycoproteins and the enzymes responsible for their biosynthesis are intriguing targets because of their importance in fitness attributes such as growth, motility, and biofilm formation. Our laboratory recently reported a series of metabolic glycan inhibitors, based on rare bacterial monosaccharide scaffolds, that inhibit glycoprotein biosynthesis and elicit functional defects in the human gastrointestinal bacteria Helicobacter pylori and Bacteroides fragilis. Here, we explored the effect of metabolic glycan inhibitors on glycoprotein biosynthesis and fitness in R. solanacearum. Our preliminary results indicate that a subset of the inhibitors tested induce glycosylation defects in R. solanacearum, and we observed modest alterations in growth and biofilm formation in a compound-dependent manner. Altogether, these results may suggest that metabolic inhibitors based on monosaccharides have the potential to disrupt glycosylation in a range of bacteria, including the plant pathogen R. solanacearum.

Karen Moulton

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