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Background   Xylella fastidiosa  ( Xf ) is a gram negative bacterium inhabiting the plant vascular system. In most species this bacterium lives as a benign symbiote, but in several agriculturally important plants (e.g. coffee, citrus, grapevine)  Xf  is pathogenic.  Xf  has four loci encoding homologues to hemolysin RTX proteins, virulence factors involved in a wide range of plant pathogen interactions.    Results  We show that all four genes are expressed during pathogenesis in grapevine. The sequences from these four genes have a complex repetitive structure. At the C-termini, sequence diversity between strains is what would be expected from orthologous genes. However, within strains there is no N-terminal homology, indicating these loci encode RTXs of different functions and/or specificities. More striking is that many of the orthologous loci between strains share this extreme variation at the N-termini. Thus these RTX orthologues are most easily visualized as fusions between the orthologous C–termini and different N-termini. Further, the four genes are found in operons having a peculiar structure with an extensively duplicated module encoding a small protein with homology to the N-terminal region of the full length RTX. Surprisingly, some of these small peptides are most similar not to their corresponding full length RTX, but to the N-termini of RTXs from other  Xf  strains, and even other remotely related species.    Conclusions  These results demonstrate that these genes are expressed  in planta  during pathogenesis. Their structure suggests extensive evolutionary restructuring through horizontal gene transfers and heterologous recombination mechanisms. The sum of the evidence suggests these repetitive modules are a novel kind of mobile genetic element.    Electronic supplementary material  The online version of this article (10.1186/s12864-018-4731-9) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

The Xylella fastidosa RTX operons: evidence for the evolution of protein mosaics through novel genetic exchanges