Organisms at fault for 95 percent of agricultural infestations may soon be facing the fight of their lives because of the research of an ISU professor and his colleagues.

Thomas Baum, professor and chairman of plant pathology, worked with researchers Richard Hussey of the University of Georgia and Eric Davis of North Carolina State University to learn about the effects of harmful root-knot nematodes.

“Root-knot nematodes cause the most severe damage to plants throughout the world,” Baum said. “Every kind of crop can be susceptible.”

Root-knot nematodes possess “parasitic genes.” These nematodes burrow their way into a plant and are able to use these genes to alter the plant’s cells to feed them, which slowly destroys the plant from the inside, Baum said.

“They talk to the plant cells and persuade them [chemically] to change, even though the plant will be hurt by this over time,” Baum said.

Baum and his associates, though, believe they have found a way to stop these nematodes from continuing to destroy plant life.

The team of researchers were able to lock onto one of the root-knot nematode’s parasitic genes and render it ineffective by using double-stranded ribonucleic acid, or RNA.

In experiments, this RNA is added to plants, and is then ingested by the burrowing nematode.

When the nematode consumes the RNA inside the plant, the parasitic gene can no longer modify the plant cell, ending the parasitic process and causing the nematode to slowly starve to death.

These findings may pave the way for whole fields of crops resistant to the root-knot nematode, and Hussey thinks changes may be coming soon.

“Possibly four to five years, but that depends on the seed companies that ultimately license the technology. It will be their job to put the technology into practice by developing transgenic crops with the new root-knot nematode resistance gene. How long that takes depends on their research team,” Hussey said.

Next on the slate for the research team is to find out if the same process can be used to combat the soybean-cyst nematode, a major danger to Iowa crops. Baum expects work on this problem to last around two years.

“This is the most serious problem in soybeans,” Baum said.