The soybean cyst nematode, Heterodera glycines is one of the most damaging pathogen to soybean worldwide. Here, we used sugar beet cyst nematode,Heterodera schachtii, and Arabidopsis as a model system to study the compatible interaction between soybean cyst nematode and soybean.

Successful initiation and maintenance of feeding sites in plant roots are very important to cyst nematode to fulfill their life cycle. During this process, plant host phytohormone level changes and a large number of plant gene expression alters. Here, we present a study of the effect of salicylic acid on H. schachtii parasitism, which showed that salicylic acid inhibit the parasitism and elicit the pathogenesis-related gene expression in roots. We also characterized the function of Arabidopsis genes, two basic helix-loop-helix transcription factors and one peroxidase following H. schachtii infection. We showed that 1) two bHLH transcription factors were induced exclusively in feeding sites by H. schachtii infection and most likely this bHLH25/27 heterodimer promote the parasitism of H. schachtii on Arabidopsis roots. 2) A peroxidase (PRX53) is most likely involved in cell wall cross linking, which regulates cell elongation in hypocotyls and cell wall reorganization during syncytium formation.