Abstract
Tenuiviruses can infect the plants of the family Poaceae, and cause serious loss of crops, particularly rice and maize, in South-Eastern Asian countries. Tenuiviruses usually depend on insect vectors for their transmission and cannot be transmitted between plants through wounds or abrasions. Rice stripe virus (RSV), a typical member of tenuiviruses, is efficiently transmitted by the small brown planthopper Laodelphax striatellus in a persistent-propagative manner to cause rice stripe disease. Here we presented a convenient method, the midrib micro-injection, to mechanically inoculate insect-derived RSV into rice leaves for conducting pathogenicity assay on rice plants.