Secretions of plant-parasitic nematodes: a molecular update

The interaction between sedentary endoparasitic nematodes and plants is fascinating, because these animals have developed an ingenious way to manipulate the plant's gene regulation and metabolism to their own advantage. They are able to form highly specialized feeding structures in the plant root to satisfy their nutritional demands for development and reproduction. This ability makes them extremely successful parasites with severe consequences for agriculture. Triggered by these economical losses, detailed studies of the parasitic interaction have been performed, which resulted in an extensive descriptive knowledge. However, the underlying biochemical and molecular events of this intimate relationship have still not been elucidated. It is generally accepted that secretions produced by the nematode are responsible for the dramatic alteration of specific cells in the host plant. In the past few years, the identification of genes coding for secreted proteins was a breakthrough in plant nematode research. However, the available information is still too limited to allow the formulation of a comprehensive model, mainly because the sequences of many of these genes are novel with no similar sequence found in the existing databases. A new challenge in the coming years will be the functional analysis of these putative parasitism genes.