An RNAi-Based Control of Fusarium graminearum Infections Through Spraying of Long dsRNAs Involves a Plant Passage and Is Controlled by the Fungal Silencing Machinery

Meeting the increasing food and energy demands of a growing population will require the development of ground-breaking strategies that promote sustainable plant production. Host-induced gene silencing has shown great potential for controlling pest and diseases in crop plants. However, while delivery of inhibitory noncoding double-stranded (ds)RNA by transgenic expression is a promising concept, it requires the generation of transgenic crop plants which may cause substantial delay for application strategies depending on the transformability and genetic stability of the crop plant species. Using the agronomically important barley-Fusarium graminearum pathosystem, we alternatively demonstrate that a spray…

• DF
  Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft