Transcriptomic changes in the pre-parasitic juveniles of induced by silencing of effectors and .

Plant-parasitic root-knot nematode uses an array of effector proteins to establish successful plant infections. and are two known effectors secreted from nematode subventral oesophageal glands; being a putative secretory venom allergen AG5-like protein, whereas is a pioneer gene with a coiled-coil motif. Expression of specific effector is known to cause disturbances in the expression of other effectors. Here, we used RNA-Seq to investigate the pleiotropic effects of silencing and . A total of 25.1-51.9 million HQ reads generated from and silenced second-stage juveniles (J2s) along with freshly hatched J2s were mapped to an already annotated proteome to understand the impact on various nematode pathways. As compared to control, silencing of caused differential expression of 29 transcripts, while silencing resulted in differential expression of a broader set of 409 transcripts. In the silenced J2s, cytoplasm (GO:0005737) was the most enriched gene ontology (GO) term, whereas in the silenced worms, embryo development (GO:0009792), reproduction (GO:0000003) and nematode larval development (GO:0002119) were the most enriched terms. Limited crosstalk was observed between these two effectors as a sheer 5.9% of the up-regulated transcripts were common between and silenced nematodes. Our results suggest that in addition to the direct knock-down caused by silencing of and , the cascading effect on other genes might also be contributing to a reduction in nematode's parasitic abilities.