There is no author summary for this article yet. Authors can add summaries to their articles on ScienceOpen to make them more accessible to a non-specialist audience.
Abstract
In the context of biocontrol of plant diseases, the three families of Bacillus lipopeptides
- surfactins, iturins and fengycins were at first mostly studied for their antagonistic
activity for a wide range of potential phytopathogens, including bacteria, fungi and
oomycetes. Recent investigations have shed light on the fact that these lipopeptides
can also influence the ecological fitness of the producing strain in terms of root
colonization (and thereby persistence in the rhizosphere) and also have a key role
in the beneficial interaction of Bacillus species with plants by stimulating host
defence mechanisms. The different structural traits and physico-chemical properties
of these effective surface- and membrane-active amphiphilic biomolecules explain their
involvement in most of the mechanisms developed by bacteria for the biocontrol of
different plant pathogens.