Bacteriophage Biocontrol targeting Burkholderia gladioli - an agricultural & opportunistic human pathogen.

In this study, we investigated the potential for bacteriophage biocontrol of Burkholderia gladioli, an opportunistic human pathogen which additionally causes devastating disease and agricultural yield loses in several important crop species - thereby posing a severe threat to global food security.We developed a quantitative metric to estimate the level of disease caused by various strains of B. gladioli, and subsequently investigated whether intervention using bacteriophages was able to reduce or eliminate bacterial infection. We then probed the genomes of our B. gladioli strains to identify genetic markers of pathogenicity in our agricultural plant models.These findings allow the identification of agriculturally pathogenic B. gladioli strains, and the prevention of infection by these strains using bacteriophages.