A Soil Story: Life inside a nematode: Creative chemistry and novel pest control

摘要

There are 8 million stories in the Naked City—and at least that many in a spadeful of dirt. This is one of those stories, a tale of microbes and microscopic worms that terrorize maggots, caterpillars, and other insects that dwell in the soil. Although hints of the story appeared in the last century, when biologists came across dead insects laced with tiny roundworms, or nematodes, the full details are still being worked out. By the 1970s, microbes that live symbiotically in the gut of the nematodes had been identified as the real insect killers. The relatively few researchers who have since looked at the chemistry of these bacteria have been astonished at what they've found.