Introduction Since the available farm land is limited, feeding an increasing population can only be met by increasing yield. In addition, about 70% of India’s population still depends on agriculture for living. Therefore, it is essential to apply modern scientific methods in a major way to improve agriculture. Towards this goal, the Indian Council of Agricultural Research has launched a new initiative named the National Agricultural Innovation Project (NAIP) with financial assistance from the World Bank. The overall objective of NAIP is to facilitate an accelerated and sustainable transformation of the Indian agriculture, so that it can support poverty alleviation and income generation through collaborative development and application of agricultural innovations by the public organizations in partnership with farmers, the private sector and other stakeholders.

There are four components under NAIP, of which the component 4 focuses on building capacity to undertake basic and strategic research in frontier areas of agricultural sciences and also generate basic information on some of the fundamental processes relevant to agriculture. The subproject described here is funded by NAIP under this component to investigate the interactions between plants and root- knot nematodes, an important group of multi-cellular pests.

Plant-parasitic nematodes cause severe yield loss in many crops including cereals, pulses, vegetables and oil crops. The annual loss to world-wide agriculture caused by nematodes is estimated to be over USD100 billion. Despite this enormous impact, currently we do not have an effective and environmentally safe method to control nematode infection. Parasitic nature of these organisms makes their study using conventional genetic and biochemical approaches very difficult. Thus, the main bottle- neck to develop new control strategies is the lack of suitable methods and tools to investigate the biol ogy of nematodes.

In free-living nematodes, introduction of double-stranded RNA (dsRNA) leads to sequence specific degradation of endogenous mRNA. The consortium principal investigator’s laboratory has recently demonstrated that this phenomenon, known as RNA-mediated interference (RNAi), could be triggered in parasitic nematodes by producing nematode-specific dsRNA in host plants. The present consortium aims to employ this technology to investigate the biology of plant-nematode interactions.