Development of marker-free rice with stable and high resistance to rice black-streaked dwarf virus disease through RNA interference.

Rice black-streaked dwarf virus (RBSDV) disease transmitted by small brown planthoppers (Laodelphax striatellus Fallen, SBPH), causes severe rice yield losses in Asia (Zhou et al., 2015). Breeding resistant cultivars is one of the most economical and effective strategies to control the disease. In the past two decades, there were several studies on the identification of cultivars and the detection of QTLs for RBSDV-resistance (Feng et al., 2019). However, few highly resistant germplasms or genes have been found (Sun et al., 2017), severely hindering the development of elite varieties with high RBSDV-resistance through either conventional breeding or marker-assisted selection (MAS) breeding.