Hello World! NEM-EMERGE is underway

In January 2024, the NEM-EMERGE project got underway, and the consortium partners met in Wageningen on 22-23 February to celebrate the project’s kick-off meeting.

More than 30 partners from the 19 institutions that comprise the consortium attended this first meeting, which served both to celebrate that the project has been funded and to present the general lines of the work each will carry out over the four years that NEM-EMERGE will last.

In an atmosphere of teamwork and responsibility, the partners launched the project with the ambition to achieve all the objectives set at the beginning of the project and discussed the approach and working flows for each work package.

NEM-EMERGE is determined to fight the emergence and proliferation of invasive and virulent soil-borne nematodes, especially on tomatoes and potatoes. As explained by one of the project coordinators, Hans Helder (Wageningen University), “Among other things, we are going to investigate the current distribution of root-knot nematodes: where exactly are they currently occurring? From southern Turkey and Spain to northern Germany, we are going to take soil samples about every two to three hundred kilometres to investigate the presence of plant-parasitic nematodes. Based on the resulting picture, modellers can predict where we can expect them in five or 15 years.”

The co-coordinator Aska Goverse (Wageningen University) adds: “We have been working on the molecular mechanisms that underly the (mis)functioning of resistance genes for several years. We have a pretty good view of the factors determining their function for some diseases, but not yet for these plant-parasitic nematodes. In the case of tomatoes, we often don’t know whether the loss of resistance is caused by temperature increase or genetic selection. That makes predicting further developments challenging.”