Rapid identification of plant-health related bacteria by MALDI-TOF mass spectrometry

Recent studies have shown that MALDI-TOF MS can be a useful technique for identification of plant pathogenic bacteria. For example, the technique has sufficient discriminatory power to distinguish members of the genus Clavibacterfrom the related Curtobacteriumgenus, and to distinguish the different subspecies of Clavibactermichiganensisfrom each other (Zalugaet al. 2011). But plant-associated bacteria have not been widely evaluated with the MALDI-TOF MS technique and profiles of reference strains of these bacteria are largely absent from commercially available identification databases. At this moment, this limits the application of the technology in plant pathology.The aim of this project is (1) to identify missing data/needs for increased resolution of plant pathogens in the current database; (2) to characterize a number of plant-health relevant bacteria to initiate the development of reliable database; and (3) to perform interlaboratory comparisons/parallel analysis to check for potential reproducibility/data exchange issues.