ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews certain progress made on the application of hybridoma technology to the rice viruses and possible areas of application of monoclonal antibodies (MCA) to solve virus disease problems in Asia. It presents a brief description of the five rice viruses on which MCAs have been generated. The rice viruses include rice grassy stunt virus (RGSV), rice stripe virus (RSV), rice dwarf virus (RDV), rice gall dwarf virus (RGDV), and rice ragged stunt virus (RRSV). For practical application of MCAs in rice virus researches, development of reliable and simple detection methods is essential. Virus epidemiology and resistance researches generally consume large quantities of antisera for routinely testing thousands of plant or insect samples. MCAs have been used in ELISA for the detection of RGSV, RSV, RDV, RGDV, and RRSV in suspension or infected tissue extracts. The hemagglutination test has been widely adopted in the RSV disease forecasting programs for the detection of RSV in insect vectors in overwintering populations.
