The horizontal acquisition of virulence plasmids is potentiated by production practices in plant nurseries and is sufficient to transition Rhodococcus from being beneficial to being pathogenic.
Metabolomics and stable isotope labelling studies of virulent Mycobacterium tuberculosis reveal a de-centralised metabolic network able to utilise various amino acids as nitrogen sources to a better extent than ammonium.
The attempt to manipulate a microbiome in planta to study the ecological consequences under field conditions leaves plants and their microbes surprisingly unimpressed.
Beneficial symbiotic bacteria encode an exceptional number of toxin-related genes that are all expressed by the symbionts in the host, supporting their key role in host-microbe interactions.