Microscopic roundworms form specialized feeding tubes to sequester nutrients from their plant hosts.

What is it about?

Root-knot nematodes are one of nature’s most successful parasites or pathogens, representing a global threat to food and fiber crop production. These microscopic roundworms use a hollow mouth stylet to secrete proteins that form an essential structure, called a feeding tube, inside the giant feeding cells they induce in host roots to take up nutrients required to complete their life cycle. To better understand the composition of feeding tubes, we developed a protocol to isolate feeding tubes for proteome analysis and identified a stylet-secreted effector protein family as a core component of these unique structures. Our findings give scientists a first look into the protein composition of feeding tubes opening the door to a better understanding of their structure and function in nematode parasitism.

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Photo by Dylan de Jonge on Unsplash

Photo by Dylan de Jonge on Unsplash

Why is it important?

Root-knot nematodes represent the most damaging group of soilborne plant-parasitic nematodes impacting global crop production. These microscopic roundworms have an extensive host range including most agricultural crops grown resulting in billions of dollars in economic losses annually. By identifying the protein composition of feeding tubes, our findings open the door to a novel approach to disrupt root-knot nematode parasitism by interfering with the establishment of a structure essential for feeding as a means to engineer broad-spectrum crop plant resistance. This could help to reduce the billions of dollars in annual yield losses by these important agricultural pathogens.