Establishment of Novel and Efficient Methods for Investigating Sexual Reproduction in .

Rice blast, caused by , significantly threatens global rice production. Disease control is complicated by the pathogen's high genetic diversity, which is driven by heterothallic recombination between opposite mating types that underlies variation. However, mechanisms governing sexual reproduction in this fungus remain poorly characterized, largely due to the absence of reliable methods for scalable ascospore progeny production. In this study, we established two novel mating methods, namely Conidial Mixing Mating (CMM) and Hyphal Segments Mixed Mating (HMM). Both methods employed optimized suspensions (5 × 10 conidia/mL or equivalent hyphal density) mixed at 1:1 ratios, incubated under standardized conditions: 20 °C with a 12 h/12 h photoperiod. We characterized perithecia, asci, and ascospore morphology using fluorescence microscopy, paraffin sectioning, cryo-scanning electron microscopy, and transmission electron microscopy. Furthermore, both methods enabled phenotypic characterization of sexual reproduction-deficient mutants, including Δ and Δ. In conclusion, we established two efficient methods for investigating sexual reproduction, providing foundational tools to advance studies of sexual mechanisms, pathogenicity evolution, and genetic variation.