The ethylene pathway is involved in regulating the mechanism of early identification of plants by soybean spores.

Soybean cyst nematode, SCN; Heteroderaglycines is one of the most serious diseases causing soybean production to fall.
chemical perception function is one of the important basis for the behavioral reactions of the worms to take food, mate, lay eggs and avoid harm.
Many studies have shown that plant parasites recognize the chemical signals of host plants through chemical receptors to correctly locate the host and select suitable infestion locations, which is a prerequisite for plant parasites to complete infestion and establish parasitic relationships with the host.
There have been studies reporting that plant defense hormones salage acid, jasmine acid, and ethylene signals are involved in regulating the host's response to plant worms, but there is a great lack of functional research on their function in the early stages of plant-to-worm interoperability, i.e. the host stage of nimatosis identification.
recent research results from the Field Pest Control Unit of the Northeast Institute of Geography and Agricultural Ecology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences show that the ethylene pathway has already played a role in the early identification of hosts in SCN.
soybean seedlings were treated with ethylene synthesis inhibitor AVG, more J2 larvae were attracted around the root tip of the treatment group than in the control group, suggesting that ethylene synthesis pathways or signals were involved in regulating SCN to identify root signals.
An in-depth study of the molecular basis for SCN's identification of phytochemical signals using the ethylene mutants of the model plant athropophymetic mustard found that ethylene insensitive mutants ein2, ein3, ein5 and ein6 increased the attraction of root tips to J2 larvae;
addition, ethylene functional inhibitor Ag can reverse SCN's response to eto1 and eto3, and the above results fully show that the ethylene pathway played a negative regulatory role in SCN's process of identifying phytochemical signals.
this is similar to previous reports that ethylene signal regulators attract root-linked worms (Fudali et al.2013), but contrary to the regulatory mechanism of beet spore cysts, which are closely related to them.
This study reveals that the molecular mechanism by which SCN perceives hosts to release chemical signals helps to understand the behavioral characteristics of plant niches to identify hosts and provides an important theoretical basis for further mining new control techniques from the early signal recognition phases of niches to plants.
the findings were published in the journal Scientific Reports, with assistant researcher Hu Yanfeng as the lead author and researcher Wang Yuli as the lead author of the paper.
the study was funded by the 100-person program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (31471749).
: Hu, Y., You, J, Li, C., Williamson, V.M., Wang, C.(2017) Ethylene response pathway modulates attractiveness of plant roots to cyst nematode Heteroderaglycines.Scientific Reports 7,41282; doi:10.1038/srep418.