Nematode-Trapping Fungi Eavesdrop on Nematode Pheromones
Abstract
The recognition of molecular patterns associated with specific pathogens or food sources is fundamental to ecology and plays a major role in the evolution of predator-prey relationships. Recent studies showed that nematodes produce an evolutionarily highly conserved family of small molecules, the ascarosides, which serve essential functions in regulating nematode development and behavior. Here, we show that nematophagous fungi, natural predators of soil-dwelling nematodes, can detect and respond to ascarosides. Nematophagous fungi use specialized trapping devices to catch and consume nematodes, and previous studies demonstrated that most fungal species do not produce traps constitutively but rather initiate trap formation in response to their prey. We found that ascarosides, which are constitutively secreted by many species of soil-dwelling nematodes, represent a conserved molecular pattern used by nematophagous fungi to detect prey and trigger trap formation. Ascaroside-induced morphogenesis is conserved in several closely related species of nematophagous fungi and occurs only under nutrient-deprived conditions. Our results demonstrate that microbial predators eavesdrop on chemical communication among their metazoan prey to regulate morphogenesis, providing a striking example of predator-prey coevolution. We anticipate that these findings will have broader implications for understanding other interkingdom interactions involving nematodes, which are found in almost any ecological niche on Earth.
Additional Information
© 2013 Elsevier Ltd. Received: November 2, 2012. Revised: November 19, 2012. Accepted: November 19, 2012. Published: December 13, 2012. We thank American Type Culture Collection, Centraalbureau voor Schimmelcultures, and S.S. Tzean for providing fungal strains; A. Dillman for assisting with the construction of the phylogenetic tree; and J. Leadbetter, H. Schwartz, M. Kato, J. Cho, S. von Reuss, and anonymous reviewers for valuable comments and suggestions. This work was supported by the National Institutes of Health (GM088290 to F.C.S.) and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, of which P.W.S. is an Investigator.Attached Files
Accepted Version - nihms429942.pdf
Supplemental Material - mmc1.pdf
Supplemental Material - mmc2.avi
Files
Additional details
- PMCID
- PMC4047969
- Eprint ID
- 37531
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20130315-093313407
- NIH
- GM088290
- Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI)
- Created
-
2013-03-18Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
-
2021-11-09Created from EPrint's last_modified field