Rice cultivar Hui1586 exhibits strong broad-spectrum resistance to blast fungi
To breed new rice restorer cultivar with broad-spectrum resistance to blast fungus Magnaporthe oryzae , a resistant japonicacultivar Suxiu867 was crossed with a restorer cultivar Minghui86. After two times backcross with Suxiu867 and six successive generations self-interbred, a new stable restorer line named Hui1586 was obtained (see methods). To assess the resistance of Hui1586 to rice blast fungi in natural conditions, we planted Hui1586 and susceptiblejaponica cultivar Nipponbare as control in the field at Jinggangshan, Jiangxi Province and Yichang, Hubei Province, two locations in China with a high incidence of rice blast disease. At both locations, Hui1586 exhibited strong resistance to blast disease compared with Nipponbare (Fig. 1A and 1B), indicating that Hui1586 has broad-spectrum resistance to blast fungus. To confirm this, two-week-old plants growing in the greenhouse were inoculated with thirteen Nipponbare-compatible M. oryzae isolates (Table. 1) including Guy11, a widely used strain in studying rice–M. oryzaeinteractions. We observed that Hui1586 was highly resistant to all tested blast strains (Fig. 1C and Table 1). Together, the results showed that Hui1586 has broad-spectrum high resistance to rice blast fungi.