The basic components of the RNAi process, namely the endonuclease Dicer, which first chops long dsRNAs into short interfering RNAs (siRNAs), and the RNA-induced silencing complex (RISC), which facilitates the targeting and endonucleolytic attack on mRNAs with sequence identity to the dsRNA, are evolutionarily conserved across virtually all eukaryotic taxa, and consequently, RNAi could be readily applied to any insect species