Management of citrus huanglongbing with native citrus endophytes
Huanglongbing is one of the uncontrollable citrus tree diseases resulting in tremendous loses to citrus industry. However, until now there has been no control strategy to manage this disease in vitro and on large scale in citrus grove. Here we showed that indigenous citrus endophyte Bacillus subtilis L1-21 could reduce the Clas pathogen to 1000 times after 4 days inside leaves midribs using novel citrus-half leaf method. Our study highlights for the first time restructuring of citrus microbiome using indigenous endophytes that could be used in the citrus field to mitigate the devastating disease HLB.