The National Institutes of Health has granted University of California - Riverside nematologist Simon “Niels” Groen a $1.9 million Outstanding Investigator Award aimed at better understanding how roundworm parasites (also called nematodes), invade humans, livestock and plants, according to a release.
He hopes to prevent a “ticking time bomb: the decreasing effectiveness of pesticides and antibiotics for infections.” The first part of the five-year project will examine hundreds of tomato and rice plants, both those grown on farms and those growing in the wild that are not artificially bred for immunity. Groen expects many wild plants will have developed defenses against infectious roundworms.
“We will learn the molecular mechanisms by which plants defend themselves. This includes the production of defensive chemicals, some of which could be harnessed as novel drugs or antibiotics in humans and livestock,” Groen said. “We can then share this information with biomedical researchers and crop breeders.”
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Soybeans currently face the most devastating impacts from nematodes. “For rice and tomatoes, nematodes may cause up to 20% loss of yield. That’s a lot of people who don’t get to eat,” Groen said.
For the second part of the project, the research team will look into how nematodes break down the plants’ resistance. Groen said farmers are finding nematodes in their supposedly resistant tomato crops.
“We don’t understand how they broke the resistance. Is there one way, or multiple ways they were able to do this? We will try to identify how many ways there are to skin a cat, from a nematode’s perspective,” Groen said.
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