bioRxiv preprint doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/681643; this version posted July 2, 2019. The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not certified by peer review) is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under aCC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license. 1 1 A horizontally acquired expansin gene increases virulence of the emerging plant 2 pathogen Erwinia tracheiphila 3 Jorge Rochaa,b*#, Lori R. Shapiroa,c*, Roberto Koltera 4 5 #Address correspondence to Jorge Rocha,
[email protected] 6 a Department of Microbiology, Harvard Medical School, Boston MA. 7 b Present Address: Conacyt-Centro de Investigación y Desarrollo en Agrobiotecnología 8 Alimentaria, San Agustin Tlaxiaca, Mexico 9 c Present Address: Department of Applied Ecology, North Carolina State University, 10 Raleigh, NC 11 12 * JR and LRS contributed equally to this work. 13 Word count: Abstract 219, Main Text (Introduction, Results, Discussion) 4354 14 15 Running title: An expansin increases Erwinia tracheiphila virulence 16 #Address correspondence to Jorge Rocha,
[email protected] 17 Keywords: expansin, virulence, glycoside hydrolase, Cucurbita, Erwinia, squash, plant 18 cell wall, cellulose, pectin, horizontal gene transfer, plant pathogen, xylem 19 20 Author Contributions: JR and LRS conceived of the study. JR designed and conducted 21 molecular protocols and lab experiments. LRS conducted computational analyses and 22 performed experiments. JR, LRS and RK interpreted experimental data. JR and LRS 23 wrote the first draft of the manuscript, and JR, LRS and RK added critical revisions. bioRxiv preprint doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/681643; this version posted July 2, 2019.