By MICHELE F. MIHALJEVICH
Indiana Correspondent

RIVERSIDE, Calif. — For researchers at the University of California-Riverside (UCR), a three-year grant is more than an opportunity to identify and catalog nematodes.

The funding from the National Science Foundation will also allow them to develop a website to help farmers, scientists and anyone else identify nematodes without worrying about keywords or a lot of text, said Paul De Ley, associate professor at UCR’s College of Natural and Agricultural Sciences.

“The identification system will be sort of a ‘nematodes for dummies,’” De Ley said. “Using images, and by a process of elimination, anyone will be able to use the site to narrow down the particular nematode they are trying to identify, without using special vocabulary or keywords.”

Nematodes are roundworms, De Ley said. Some, such as those found in soil, are microscopic. Dog heartworm and ascaris found in pigs are other examples of nematodes. There are millions of nematode species, and very few have been identified, De Ley said.

“Ninety to 95 percent of the effort has been focused on the ones that are likely to be harmful to agriculture, animals and humans,” he said. “For example, farmers just really want to know if the particular species they have is damaging to their crop or not.”
Complicating the identification process is the difficulty in telling some of the species apart even with a good microscope, De Ley said. In order to properly identify some species, researchers must look at genes.

The foundation grant to UCR is $1.1 million, he said. In addition, $500,000 has been given to researchers at Carnegie-Mellon University, Elizabeth City State University and the University of New Hampshire. The planned website will allow users to choose their level of expertise, De Ley said.

“It will offer people several different tools of knowledge,” he said.

“They won’t have to know a lot of technical jargon to use the site.”
Researchers are trying to come up with the best way to design the site, including how to sort the images and how to best organize them online, he said. De Ley would like to see the site eventually include more information, such as diseases caused by nematodes.

“It would be helpful for farmers to see a picture of the diseased plant, with a link to an image and information about the insect that caused it,” he said.

Image recognition software could also be incorporated to help with the identification process. “The computer system could train itself,” he said. “Eventually, you could just send in a photo of a bug and the computer would come up with an image and more information.”
Farmers in the Midwest might be familiar with the soybean cyst nematode, which is the most important pest of soybeans throughout the Soybean Belt, said Virginia Ferris, a professor in the entomology department at Purdue University.

“It causes economic damage to our crops,” she said. “Our job is to make sure the crop the farmer plants brings in as much money as possible. With the cost of production going up, it’s important to get the best yield they can.”

Purdue researchers are working to make soybean plants more resistant to nematodes, she said. Funding for identifying nematodes and controlling them is hard to find.