Preference Assessment of White-backed Planthopper Feeding on Rice

Exploiting insect-resistant rice germplasm resources and related genes is the primary need for breeding insect-resistant varieties, but the accuracy of the identification of insect-resistant phenotypes of rice is a major difficulty. It is urgent to develop a new method or improve existing methods to screen rice for insect resistance. This article describes a simple and feasible method to assess nonpreference-type resistance of rice to the white-backed planthopper (WBPH), Sogatella furcifera, in the laboratory. The preference of adult WBPHs feeding or inhabiting on maturing rice plants is continuously analyzed by pairwise comparison. The dynamic changes of WBPHs on rice plants are recorded and compared as an index of resistance identification. The current method is simply operable and easily observable and has a short cycle. The use of this method could be extended to investigate the feeding and oviposition preference of similar hemipterans, such as the brown planthopper (BPH), Nilaparvata lugens(Stål).