Dickeya species are soft rot disease-causing bacterial plant pathogens and an emerging agricultural threat in Europe. Environmental modulation of gene expression is critical for Dickeya dadantii pathogenesis. While the bacterium uses various environmental cues to distinguish between its habitats, an intricate transcriptional control system coordinating the expression of virulence genes ensures efficient infection. Understanding of this behaviour requires a detailed knowledge of expression patterns under a wide range of environmental conditions, which is currently lacking. To obtain a comprehensive picture of this adaptive response, we devised a strategy to examine the D. dadantii transcriptome in a series of 32 infection-relevant conditions encountered in the hosts. We propose a temporal map of the bacterial response to various stress conditions and show that D. dadantii elicits complex genetic behaviour combining common stress-response genes with distinct sets of genes specifically induced under each particular stress. Comparison of our dataset with an in planta expression profile reveals the combined impact of stress factors and enables us to predict the major stress confronting D. dadantii at a particular stage of infection. We provide a comprehensive catalog of D. dadantii genomic responses to environmentally relevant stimuli, thus facilitating future studies of this important plant pathogen.
© 2016 Society for Applied Microbiology and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.