The soft rot Erwinia

Abstract

The soft rot Erwinia are members of the most studied bacterial family, the Enterobacteriaceae, which also includes other important plant and animal pathogens such as Pantoea, Escherichia, Salmonella, Klebsiella, and Yersinia species. Plant pathologists have been studying the soft rot Erwinia for nearly 120 years and published thousands of pages on this pathogen. Because the soft rot Erwinia are amenable to genetic manipulation and because they are wide spread in the environment, they serve as an important model for studying the ecology and evolution of enterobacterial pathogenesis.