A pathovar is a

bacteria Bacteria (; : bacterium) are ubiquitous, mostly free-living organisms often consisting of one Cell (biology), biological cell. They constitute a large domain (biology), domain of Prokaryote, prokaryotic microorganisms. Typically a few micr ...

l strain or set of strains with the same or similar characteristics, that is differentiated at infrasubspecific level from other strains of the same species or subspecies on the basis of distinctive pathogenicity to one or more

plant Plants are the eukaryotes that form the Kingdom (biology), kingdom Plantae; they are predominantly Photosynthesis, photosynthetic. This means that they obtain their energy from sunlight, using chloroplasts derived from endosymbiosis with c ...

hosts. Pathovars are named as a ternary or quaternary addition to the species binomial name, for example the bacterium that causes

citrus canker Citrus canker is a disease affecting ''Citrus'' species caused by the bacterium '' Xanthomonas citri''. Infection causes lesions on the leaves, stems, and fruit of citrus trees, including lime, oranges, and grapefruit. While not harmful to huma ...

Xanthomonas axonopodis ''Xanthomonas'' (from greek: ''xanthos'' – "yellow"; ''monas'' – "entity") is a genus of bacteria, many of which cause plant diseases. There are at least 27 plant associated ''Xanthomonas spp.'', that all together infect at least 400 plant s ...

'', has several pathovars with different host ranges, ''X. axonopodis'' pv. ''citri'' is one of them; the abbreviation 'pv.' means pathovar. The

type Type may refer to: Science and technology Computing * Typing, producing text via a keyboard, typewriter, etc. * Data type, collection of values used for computations. * File type * TYPE (DOS command), a command to display contents of a file. * ...

strains of pathovars are pathotypes, which are distinguished from the types (

holotype A holotype (Latin: ''holotypus'') is a single physical example (or illustration) of an organism used when the species (or lower-ranked taxon) was formally described. It is either the single such physical example (or illustration) or one of s ...

neotype In biology, a type is a particular specimen (or in some cases a group of specimens) of an organism to which the scientific name of that organism is formally associated. In other words, a type is an example that serves to anchor or centralizes ...

, etc.) of the species to which the pathovar belongs.

References

Biological classification Bacterial plant pathogens and diseases Microbiology Pathovars {{plant-disease-stub

See also

References