Transgenic rice overexpressing insect endogenous microRNA csu‐novel‐260 is resistant to striped stem borer under field conditions

The result confirmed the efficacy of these trimmed amiRNAs (Figure 1e), indicating that the length of natural miRNAs would not be a major consideration when constructing the amiRNA expression vectors. [...]we evaluated SSB resistance under field conditions, resembling practical rice production. Because SSB infestation causes ‘deadheart’ in the tillering stage and ‘whitehead’ in the heading stage, we conducted two independent field assessments of SSB resistance in these two stages. Because endogenous miRNAs naturally regulate their gene targets in insects, their use theoretically avoids certain factors that cause inefficient RNAi, such as refractory target genes and relevant RNAi machinery deficiency (Cooper et al., 2019). [...]critical siRNA and miRNA components associated with their biogenesis and function are significantly different (Cooper et al., 2019), potentially causing variations among insects in terms of small RNA stability, cellular uptake and intercellular transport between siRNA and miRNA.