To generate the AfuRbp silencing cassette, an inducible RNAi transcriptional unit was designed based on a previously described protocol[19, 20]. This unit was driven by the glaA promoter and comprises an approximately 500 bp Rbp fragment (sense, nucleotides 342-841), followed by a 100-bp buffer EGFp fragment and the same ~500 bp Rbp fragment in the opposite direction (antisense). Sense and antisense fragments were amplified by PCR using primers RBP_SENSE_F and RBP_SENSE_R carrying appropriate restriction sites (Table 1) and cloned into PGEM-GlaA vector. A 100-bp EGFP fragment was then amplified by PCR using specific primers (Table 1) and cloned between the latter fragments to generate final silencing cassette (pRBP_RNAi) (Fig. 1B).