Welcome to the Alfano lab web site! The Alfano lab is associated with the Department of Plant Pathology and the Center for Plant Science Innovation in the Center for Biotechnology at the University of Nebraska - Lincoln. Members of our research team study the strategies bacterial pathogens employ to cause diseases on plants. As a model system we study the gram-negative bacterial plant pathogen Pseudomonas syringae and its interactions with plants. An important feature that P. syringae has that allows it to grow in plants and sooner or later cause disease is a protein secretion system called the type III protein secretion system. This protein secretion system is found in many gram-negative bacterial pathogens of both plants and animals and other bacteria in close associations with eukaryotic organisms. The truly remarkable characteristic of type III systems is that they not only secrete proteins from the bacterial cell, but they also deliver or translocate bacterial proteins into eukaryotic cells. Our main research focus is to understand how type III secretion works and to determine what the translocated proteins (known as effectors) are doing inside the plant cell to favor parasitism. We are also pursuing genomic approaches to study bacterial pathogenesis and we are members of a consortium of researchers funded by the NSF that are sequencing P. s. tomato DC3000 (http://pseudomonas-syringae.org) and using functional genomic approaches to understand the complex interaction that this bacterium has with plants.