Volatile organic compounds (VOCs) are naturally occurring chemicals generally found in and easily emitted as vapors and gases from many living organisms like bacteria, fungi etc. and plants. These organic compounds contain elements like carbon, bromine, chlorine, fluorine, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen fluorine and sulfur are known to have nematicidal properties. For example, the volatiles from neem (Azadirachta indica) and mustard (Brassica juncea) reduced the population of root- knot nematodes, Meloidogyne incognita (Barros et al., 2014) and from various species of bacteria killed root-knot nematodes (Lu et al., 2014) as well as the pinewood nematode, Bursaphelnchus xylophilus (Gu et al., 2007).
Research Papers
1. Barros, A. F., Campos, V. P., Pereira da Silva, J. C., Pedroso, M. P., Vasconcelos Medeiros, F. H., Pozza, E. A. and Reale, A. L. 2014. Nematicidal activity of volatile organic compounds emitted by Brassica juncea, Azadirachta indica, Canavalia ensiformis, Mucuna pruriens and Cajanus cajan against Meloidogyne incognita. Applied Soil Ecology 80: 34- 43.
2. Gu, Y.Q., Mo, M.H., Zhou, J.P., Zou, C.S. and Zhang, K.Q. 2007. Evaluation and identification of potential organic nematicidal volatiles from soil bacteria. Soil Biology and Biochemistry 39: 2567- 2575.
3. Lu, H., Wang, X., Zhang, K., Xu, Y. Y., Zhou, L. and Li, G. 2014. Identification and nematicidal activity of bacteria isolated from cow dung. Annals of Microbiology 64: 407- 411.