THE ANTIBIOTIC ACTIVITY OF SOIL MICROORGANISMS AS RELATED TO BACTERIAL PLANT PATHOGENS

Abstract

In an attempted evaluation of the importance of soil antagonisms as a possible factor in the different survival capabilities of some bacterial plant pathogens in the soil environment, a comparison was made of the numbers of antagonists detected when different plant pathogenic species were used as test organisms in determining the "antibiotic potential" of nine "virgin" soils. It was found that there are present among the soil flora a great abundance of microorganisms intrinsically capable of antagonizing most of the bacterial pathogens tested and only for a few species are such antagonists relatively rare. There were great differences in the number of isolates antagonistic to the different pathogenic species, even in the same genus, and there seemed to be a correlation between the numbers of antagonists, as found here, and the capability of a species to maintain itself for long periods in the soil. For the most part the Xanthomonas species appeared to be most sensitive to the antagonistic soil microflora while the soft-rot-causing Erwinia species were most resistant.A comparative study of the antibiotic activity of 120 of the most active antagonistic isolates tested against 28 bacterial plant pathogens showed that each antagonist was characterized by a specific antibacterial spectrum and those antagonists having the most intense antibiotic activity usually inhibited the greatest number of bacterial species. Many antagonists were highly specific, affecting only certain groups or even certain species. The high specificity which characterized some of the antibiotic reactions was used to separate sharply, consistently, and with minimum effort such closely related species as E. carotovora and E. atroseptica or X. corylina and X. juglandis.