RNAi from plants to nematodes

Coincident with the award of the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 2006 to Fire and Mello for their discovery of RNAi, plant scientists have succeeded in using RNAi-based techniques to control nematodes, a hitherto unmanageable plant parasite. Recent work has demonstrated that the expression in a host plant of double-stranded RNA targeting housekeeping or parasitism genes in the root-knot nematode resulted in resistance to nematode infection.