Plant Nematode Interactions

Carolina Escobar completed a first degree in Biology at the University Autonoma of Madrid where she also received her M.Sc. degree. She was a PhD student at the John Innes Center, UK, in Molecular aspects of oxidative stress in plants, receiving her PhD degree from the University of East Anglia, UK in 1998. After a brief post-doctoral position at Wageningen University, Netherlands, on molecular analysis of the Rhizobium interaction, she moved at Castilla La Mancha (UCLM) University in 1999 as part of the group of Plant Biotechnology and Molecular Biologyleaded by Carmen Fenoll. In 2003, she started her own research group on molecular and developmental aspects of the plant-nematode interaction with the aim to identify biotechnology tools for nematode control supported by National and EU funding. She holds an assistant professorship position at the Department of Environmental Sciences, UCLM, and teaches in different courses as Functional Cell Biology, Plant physiology, Genetic Engineering and Systems Biology. She has been also a visitor researcher at Durham University, UK, and at the National Biotechnology Center in Madrid, Spain. As a result, she has supervised 5 PhD thesis and more than 20 final research projects for M. Sc. students and undergraduates. She actively participates in the EU Erasmus mobility program supervising several students every year and holds extensive collaborations with different groups in Europe. She also keeps active a research line on the initial plant responses to contaminants as heavy metals, pointing to the restoration of local Hg contaminated areas. Carmen Fenoll obtained her PhD in Biological Sciences at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid/ National Research Council-CSIC, working on photosynthetic bacteria. She moved to the field of plant molecular biology as a Fulbright postdoc at the University of California-San Diego (CA) and established her group at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid in 1990 as an Associate Professor. In 2000, she moved to the Universidad de Castilla-la Mancha as part of a team to set up a new Faculty and Research Institute on Environmental Sciences in Toledo (Spain). Since then, she is Professor of Plant Biology at the Faculty of Environmental Sciences and Biochemistry in that University, where she teaches molecular biology, genetic engineering, genomics, plant physiology and biotechnology. She coordinates the research group on Plant Biotechnology and Molecular Biology, interested in the regulation of gene expression and cell differentiation and development using molecular genetics and genomics in several biological systems, one of which is nematode feeding sites induced by Meloidogyne spp. in Arabidopsis thaliana. She has also been Visiting Scientist at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, CA, and Tinker Full Professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison

1. Overview of Root-Knot Nematodes and Giant Cells
Carolina Escobar, Marta Barcala, Javier Cabrera, and Carmen Fenoll
2. Introductory Chapter on the Basic Biology of Cyst Nematodes
Holger Bohlmann
3. Cell Wall Alterations in Nematode-Infected Roots
Krzysztof Wieczorek
4. The Plant Cell Cycle Machinery: Usurped and Modulated by Plant Parasitic Nematodes
Janice de Almeida Engler, Paulo Vieira, Natalia Rodiuc, Maria Fatima Grossi de Sa and      Gilbert Engler
5. Metabolism in Nematode Feeding Sites
Shahid Siddique and Florian M. W. Grundler
6. The Role of Lipid Signaling in Regulating Plant Nematode Interactions
Sigal Brown Miyara, Iberkleid Ionit, Patricia Buki and Mike Kolomiets
7. Developmental Pathways Mediated by Hormones in Nematode Feeding Sites
Javier Cabrera, Fernando E. Díaz-Manzano, Carmen Fenoll and Carolina Escobar
8. Recent Advances in Understanding Plant-Nematode Interactions in Monocots
Diana Fernandez, Anne-Sophie Petitot, Maíra Grossi de Sá, Vu Phong Nguy?n, Janice de Almeida-Engler, and Tina Kyndt
9. Gene Silencing in Nematode Feeding Sites
Tarek Hewezi and Thomas J. Baum
10. Exploiting Solved Genomes of Plant Parasitic Nematodes to Understand Parasitism
David M. Bird, Valerie M. Williamson and Charles H. Opperman
11. Emerging Roles of Cyst Nematode Effectors in Exploiting Plant Cellular Processes
Michael Gardner, Anju Verma, and Melissa G. Mitchum
12. Function of Root Knot Nematode Effectors and Their Targets in Plant Parasitism
Nhat My Truong, Chinh-Nghia Nguyen, Pierre Abad, Michaël Quentin, Bruno Favery
13. Suppression of Plant Defences by Plant-Parasitic Nematodes
Sophie Mantelin, Peter Thorpe and John T. Jones
14. Application of Biotechnology for Nematode Control in Crop Plants
John Fosu-Nyarko and Michael G K Jones