Legionella pneumophila, a causative agent of Legionnaires' disease, is a facultative intracellular parasite of freshwater protozoa. Legionella pneumophila features a unique developmental network that involves several developmental forms including the infectious cyst forms. Reservoirs of L. pneumophila include natural and man-made freshwater systems; however, recent studies have shown that isola...

Plant parasitic nematodes remain a major challenge to crop production that has hitherto received minmum research attention in sub-Saharan Africa. This paper gives the diversity of nematode genera and species associated with cereal crops and indicates the possibility of nemadode population build up due to production intensification especially in soils with high sand content. Twenty-two nematode ...

Cyst nematodes are plant-parasitic roundworms that are of significance in many cropping systems around the world. Cyst nematode infection is facilitated by effector proteins secreted from the nematode into the plant host. The cDNAs of the 25A01-like effector family are novel sequences that were isolated from the oesophageal gland cells of the soybean cyst nematode (Heterodera glycines). To aid ...

The potato-cyst nematodes Heterodera rostochiensis and H. pallida are important pathogens of potatoes, a basic food crop. When soil populations of either species are high, potato yields are often less than the seed planted. Apparently, these nematodes originated in the Andean mountains of South America, the home of the potato. One or both species have spread from this region to approximately 47...

Soybean cyst nematode (Heterodera glycines, SCN) is the most harmful pathogen of soybean (Glycine max (L.) Merr.) worldwide. In 2016, a new soybean-parasitic nematode, Heterodera sojae (the white nematode) was found parasitizing roots plants in Korea. To investigate distribution and population density H. sojae, 943 soil samples were collected from fields all nine provinces Korea 2017 to 2018. C...

Actin is an abundant, highly expressed, and much conserved protein belonging to the actin–heat shock protein70–sugarkinase superfamily. The full-length messenger RNAs encoding actin were cloned and characterized from the plant-parasitic cyst nematodes Heterodera glycines and Globodera rostochiensis and from the free-living nematode Panagrellus redivivus. The actins from the plant-parasitic nema...

For on-site detection of cysts, a portable cyst extraction kit was constructed from nine readily available items. The portable cyst extractor detected cysts in a range of 1-117 cysts/100 g soil from 42 fields. Samples processed by this kit in fields were clean and easy to examine, possibly because the kit is a compact version of the standard wet-sieving technique used in the laboratory. The por...

Plant-parasitic nematodes are destructive plant pathogens that cause significant yield losses. They induce highly specialized feeding sites (NFS) in infected plant roots from which they withdraw nutrients. In order to establish these NFS, it is thought that the nematodes manipulate the molecular and physiological pathways of their hosts. Evidence is accumulating that the plant signalling molecu...

Like any other branch of Agricultural Sciences, the Division of Nematology at IARI, initiated researches in the exciting field of biochemistry and molecular biology of plant parasitic nematodes during the early seventies of last century. The main research areas were biochemical mechanism of resistance against phytonematodes and diagnostics of economically important plant parasitic nematodes. Sp...