ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Plant Sci.

Sec. Plant Pathogen Interactions

Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpls.2025.1554992

This article is part of the Research TopicInnovative Strategies for Enhancing Plant Resilience to Phytopathogenic MicrobesView all 11 articles

Development of a Lytic Ralstonia Phage Cocktail and Evaluation of Its Control Efficacy Against Tobacco Bacterial Wilt

Provisionally accepted
Haoxin HeHaoxin He1Ke YiKe Yi2*Lei YangLei Yang2Yongfeng JingYongfeng Jing2Lifu KangLifu Kang2Zhihao GaoZhihao Gao2Dong XiangDong Xiang2Ge TanGe Tan2Yunsheng WangYunsheng Wang1Qian LiuQian Liu1Lin XieLin Xie1Shiya JiangShiya Jiang1Tianbo LiuTianbo Liu3*Wu ChenWu Chen1*
  • 1College of Plant Protection, Hunan Agricultural University, China
  • 2Tobacco Leaf Raw Material Procurement Center, China Tobacco Hunan Industrial Co., Ltd, China
  • 3Plant Protection Research Center, Hunan Tobacco Science Research Institute, China

A correction has been applied to this article in:

  1. Corrigendum: Development of a lytic Ralstonia phage cocktail and evaluation of its control efficacy against tobacco bacterial wilt

    1. Read correction

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

Select one of your emails

You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:

Notify me on publication

Please enter your email address:

If you already have an account, please login

You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here

Bacterial wilt (BW) caused by Ralstonia pseudosolanacearum is a devastating soil-borne disease. Bacteriophages are important biocontrol resources that rapidly and specifically lyse host bacteria, showing good application potential in agricultural production. This study isolated nine phages (YL1-YL9) and, using host range and pot experiments, identified two broader host range phages (YL1 and YL4) and two higher control efficacy phages (YL2 and YL3), which were combined to obtain five cocktails (BPC-1-BPC-5). Pot experiments showed that BPC-1 (YL3 and YL4) had the highest control efficacy (99.25%). Biological characterization revealed that these four phages had substantial thermal stabilitygood thermal stability and pH tolerance. Whole genome sequencing and analysis showed that YL1, YL2, YL3, and YL4 belongedbelong to the genus Gervaisevirus. AlphaFold 3 predictions of tail fiber protein II structures showed that YL1 differed significantly from the other phages. Amino acid sequence alignment revealed that the ORF66 (YL1) "tip domain" of ORF66 (YL1) contained a higher proportion of aromatic and positively charged amino acids. However, the surface of the ORF69 (YL4) "tip domain" in ORF69 (YL4) exhibited more positively charged residues compared tothan ORF66 (YL2) and ORF70 (YL3). These characteristics are hypothesized to confer a broader host range to YL1 and YL4. This study demonstratesfound that phages assembling a broad host range and high control efficacy have better biocontrol potential, providing high-quality resources for the biological control of BW.

Keywords: Bacteria Wilt (BW), Ralstonia solanacearum, Ralstonia phage, phage cocktail, control efficacy, tail fiber

Received: 03 Jan 2025; Accepted: 19 Feb 2025.

Copyright: © 2025 He, Yi, Yang, Jing, Kang, Gao, Xiang, Tan, Wang, Liu, Xie, Jiang, Liu and Chen. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

* Correspondence:
Ke Yi, Tobacco Leaf Raw Material Procurement Center, China Tobacco Hunan Industrial Co., Ltd, China
Tianbo Liu, Plant Protection Research Center, Hunan Tobacco Science Research Institute, China
Wu Chen, College of Plant Protection, Hunan Agricultural University, China

Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

Supplementary Material