Results obtained with artificial diets suggest that a gene
encoding GNA may be a good candidate to introduce into
transgenic rice to provide resistance against rice brown
planthopper and rice green leafhopper. The use of phloemspecific
promoters to express an insecticidal protein in
phloem tissue of transgenic rice plants would be especially
useful for confering resistance to sap-sucking insects. The
present paper describes the production of transgenic rice
plants in which the phloem-specific rice sucrose synthase-
1 gene promoter (RSs1; Shi et al., 1994) and the constitutive
maize ubiquitin-1 promoter (ubi1) have been used to drive
expression of gna. The effects of expression of GNA in
transgenic rice on survival, development, fecundity and
feeding of BPH are described.