Higher plants synthesize a wide variety of phenolic compounds during normal growth and development. These compounds are products of the phenylpropanoid biosynthetic pathway in both root and shoot tissues. They generally accumulate at relatively high concentrations in the cell vacuole and are chemically associated with sugars (McClure, 1975).In pathogen-plant interactions, certain end products of the (iso)flavonoid biosynthesis pathway serve as phytoalexins in plant defense reactions (reviewed by McClure, 1975;Hahlbrock and Scheel, 1989;Peters and Verma, 1990;Rao, 1990), or as chemoattractants toward pathogenic and symbiotic bacteria (Peters and Verma, 1990), or as signal molecules required for the induction of essential bacterial genes, leading to the appropriate interaction with the host plants (Peters and Verma, 1990). In the association between