The leaflets were inoculated by placing six 10 μl drops of the bacterial suspension on six different points on the selleck chemical same leaflet. Inoculations were then carried

out by piercing through the droplets with a sterile entomological pin. The leaflets were maintained in MS media at 22°C and a 16:8-h light: dark photoperiod. Six tomato leaflets were used to evaluate each strain. Detached leaflets only inoculated with sterile distilled water were included in all experiments as a control. These experiments were repeated three times. The development of necrotic symptoms at the inoculation points (n = 108) was determined after 10-day. The severity symptoms were evaluated by the analysis of the total necrotic area per leaflet induced by the inoculated strains after 10 days of incubation. For severity measurement, the necrotic areas of the inoculation points were digitally analyzed on the six leaflets, using the computer image software VISILOG 5.0 (Noesis Vision Inc.). At the same time, two inoculated

leaflets were used to estimate the daily development of the total find more bacterial population. For that purpose, whole tomato leaflets were homogenized in sterile water and bacterial counts were determined plating by 10-fold serial dilutions on KMB plates. Bacterial growth inside the plant tissue was recorded after H2O2 leaf surface disinfection. Colony counts growth based on the typical morphology of P. syringae pv. syringae UMAF0158 were recorded after incubation at 28°C for 48 h. Transcriptional analysis From PMS cultures described above, cells from 2 ml cultures were collected and spun down at 12,000 rpm (1 min) from the wild type strain and the derivative mutants in gacA and mgoA. The cells were frozen in liquid N2 and stored at -80°C. For the RNA isolations and cDNA synthesis, three biological replicates were used for each time point. For the transcriptional analyses, RNA was isolated from the frozen bacterial cells with Trizol reagent (Invitrogen), followed by DNase I (GE Healthcare)

treatment. One μg of RNA was used from for cDNA synthesis with selleck Superscript III (Invitrogen) according to the manufacturer’s protocol. For the real-time quantitative PCR (Q-PCR), conducted with the 7300SDS system from Applied Biosystems, the SYBR Green Core kit (Eurogentec) with a final concentration of 3.5 mM MgCl2 was used according to the manufacturer’s protocol. The concentration of the primers was optimized (400 nM final concentration for all of them), and a dissociation curve was performed to check the specificity of the primers. The primers used for the Q-PCR are listed in Additional file 1: Table S1. To correct for small differences in template concentration, rpoD was used as the reference housekeeping gene. The cycle in which the SYBR green fluorescence crossed a manually set cycle threshold (C T ) was used to determine transcript levels. For each gene, the threshold was fixed based on the exponential segment of the PCR curve.