Prediction and confirmation of type III effectors in Xylophilus ampelinus, the causal agent of the Oléron's disease of grapevine

To shed light into the biology of this pathogen, we scrutinized all available genomes of the genus for the presence of type III secretion systems [4] , predicted type III effectors using a machine-learning technique [5] and confirmed three of them to contain a functional type III secretion signal using an AvrBs1 reporter approach [6] .The presence of type III effectors suggests that effector-triggered immunity may exist in grapevine or non-host plants and that strategies targeting type III effectors for resistance engineering may contribute to suitable control measures.