Advances in humans and animals opportunistic pathogens from environment infecting plants by crossing kingdoms

Abstract:

Some pathogenic microorganisms ubiquitous in the environment could cross kingdoms to infect diverse hosts. Several cross-kingdom human pathogens were summarized in this paper, including Serratia marcescens, Enterobacter cloacae and Pseudomonas aeuriginosa. They are ubiquitous in the nature and could cause plant diseases using the same or different infection strategies with which they infect humans and broaden host range. Among these bacteria, Klebsiella pneumoniae causes top rot disease of maize in the nature, revealing some plants in the environment could serve as a reservoir of various pathogens which might infect animals and probably humans when conditions are favorable, and even potentially harm food. Research on these cross-kingdom pathogens may play a very important role in the epidemiology of human, animal and plant diseases and be a hot topic in environment science.