Sven van den Elsen

TL;DR: The exclusive common presence of fungivorous and plant parasitic nematodes supports a long-standing hypothesis that states that plant parasitic Nematodes arose from fungivory ancestors.

TL;DR: The extensiveness of convergent evolution is one of the most striking phenomena observed in the phylogenetic tree presented here – it is hard to find a morphological, ecological or biological characteristic that has not arisen at least twice during nematode evolution.

TL;DR: To illustrate the practicability of the proposed molecular framework, primers were designed for the detection of individual subclades within the order Mononchida in a complex DNA background and tested them in quantitative assays (real‐time polymerase chain reaction).

TL;DR: None of the four markers distinguished between the tropical species Meloidogyne incognita, M. javanica and M. arenaria, although the high level of mitochondrial heteroplasmy recently reported for M. chitwoodi was not found in the populations under investigation, suggesting this could be a regional phenomenon.

TL;DR: A quantitative PCR-based tool for the detection of a consistent part of the soil nematofauna was developed based on a phylum-wide molecular framework consisting of 2,400 full-length SSU rDNA sequences, revealing ecological information about the soil food web that had been partly overlooked.