Botrytis cinerea is one of the most important limiting factors for crop production
worldwide, as it demonstrated by the enormous annual intake of fungicides used for their
control to avoid crop losses. However, this fungus has been categorized by FRAC as a high-risk pathogen for fungicide resistance development. Another problem is related with the diversity of fungicides
available to growers, which according with the current European legislation on pesticides and
the European Green Deal, will be reduced by 50% by 2030. For all this, new low-impact
sustainable solutions, obtained through new phytoprotection tools, to control B. cinerea are
needed. In this study, we intend to check if some emerging strategies such as RNA interference
technology (RNAi) could be valid sustainable solution and alternative to the use of
conventional chemical fungicides for the control of B. cinerea in crops of relevance. To achieve
this goal, the SIGS (spray-induced gene silencing) approach, which concerns the exogenous
application of double-stranded RNA (dsRNA), was tested. For it, ten double-stranded RNA
(dsRNAs) were designed against the fungicide target’s genes and genes encoding proteins involved in virulence/pathogenicity of this fungus. The preliminary results obtained in in vitro tests have shown that the application of the different dsRNAs, individually
and in combination, have significantly reduced the development of the fungus on different
culture media. In addition, this reduction was very promising on detached fruit and in planta
assays, demonstrating the potential of this technique in the control of B. cinerea. On the other
hand, the sustained release of the dsRNA-fungicides using nanoparticles as a carrier or
stabilizer has also been analyzed.
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