Plant Biotechnology Journal， 2024，https://doi.org/10.1111/pbi.14334

Rice is a staple food crop feeding nearly half of the world's population. However, rice production is threatened by devastating viral diseases such as rice black-streaked dwarf virus (RBSDV), southern rice black-streaked dwarf virus (SRBSDV), rice stripe virus (RSV) and rice ragged stunt virus (RRSV) (Wang et al., 2022a). Traditional breeding for viral resistance is challenging due to the lack of natural resistance sources (Wang et al., 2022b). The application of RNA interference (RNAi) technology to generate viral resistant transgenic plants provides a promising approach. The expression of hairpin structures of viral sequences by transgenic technology in plants will produce abundant siRNAs targeting viral genomes, and the targeted viral RNA will be degraded by the plant RNAi machinery (Sasaya et al., 2014; tenOever, 2013). In recent years, there have been several reports on producing transgenic rice lines resistant to rice viruses through RNAi (Feng et al., 2021; Zhao et al., 2020). For example, transgenic rice plants expressing an hairpin RNA (hpRNA) targeting the RBSDV S6 gene showed nearly full immunity to RBSDV (Feng et al., 2021). However, conferring resistance against multiple rice viruses in a single transgenic line has not been reported. Theoretically, it is feasible to fuse sequences from multiple viruses to construct a single hairpin structure, thereby conferring resistance against multiple viruses. In this study, we simultaneously targeted four rice viruses, including RBSDV, SRBSDV, RSV and RRSV, by expressing a hairpin RNA construct, and strong and broad resistance against all four viruses was achieved in the transgenic lines.

Plant Biotechnology Journal，IF=13.8

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/pbi.14334