Host induced gene silencing of by targeting pathogenicity and development genes to control rice blast disease.

Rice blast disease caused by the hemi-biotrophic fungus is the most destructive disease of rice world-wide. Traditional disease resistance strategies for the control of rice blast disease have not proved durable. HIGS (host induced gene silencing) is being developed as an alternative strategy. Six genes () that play important roles in pathogenicity and development of were chosen for HIGS. HIGS vectors were transformed into rice calli through -mediated transformation and T0, T1 and T2 generations of transgenic rice plants were generated. Except for , HIGS transgenic rice plants challenged with showed significantly reduced disease compared with non-silenced control plants. Following infection with of HIGS transgenic plants, expression levels of target genes were reduced as demonstrated by Quantitative RT-PCR. In addition, treating with small RNA derived from the target genes inhibited fungal growth. These findings suggest RNA silencing signals can be transferred from host to an invasive fungus and that HIGS has potential to generate resistant rice against .