Practical benefits of knowing the enemy: modern molecular tools for diagnosing the etiology of bacterial diseases and understanding the taxonomy and diversity of plant-pathogenic bacteria.

Knowing the identity of bacterial plant pathogens is essential to strategic and sustainable disease management in agricultural systems. This knowledge is critical for growers, diagnosticians, extension agents, and others dealing with crops. However, such identifications are linked to bacterial taxonomy, a complicated and changing discipline that depends on methods and information that are often not used by those who are diagnosing field problems. Modern molecular tools for fingerprinting and sequencing allow for pathogen identification in the absence of distinguishing or conveniently tested phenotypic characteristics. These methods are also useful in studying the etiology and epidemiology of phytopathogenic bacteria from epidemics, as was done in numerous studies conducted in California's Salinas Valley. Multilocus and whole-genome sequence analyses are becoming the cornerstones of studies of microbial diversity and bacterial taxonomy. Whole-genome sequence analysis needs to become adequately accessible, automated, and affordable in order to be used routinely for identification and epidemiology. The power of molecular tools in accurately identifying bacterial pathogenesis is therefore of value to the farmer, diagnostician, phytobacteriologist, and taxonomist.