The goal of this proposal is to provide our farmers with a safer, more effective, and sustainable approach to manage multiple soybean diseases, such as sudden-death syndrome, Sclerotinia stem rot, Phytophthora root/stem rot, charcoal rot, and Septoria brown spot, through seed-treatment or foliar application of double stranded RNA (dsRNAs) produced in a bacterial system. These fungal diseases cause hundreds of millions of dollars in crop losses to our soybean producers each year and require repeated application of costly fungicides to manage these diseases, which not only increased the production cost, environmental pollution, but also lead to the development of super pathogens that are much more resistant to the existing fungicides, rendering them less effective. Therefore, there is an urgent need to develop a safer, more specific and sustainable way to manage plant diseases. Recently dsRNAs were found effective in suppressing fungal growth when applied onto plants. RNAs are molecules that are ubiquitous present in all living organisms and are non-toxic. Here, we explore the feasibility of utilizing the sequence information carried by the RNA molecules to pathogen infection on soybean to reduce the crop losses. The specific objectives include choosing the pathogen genes that play important roles in their infection or causing diseases on soybeans, putting these genes in a bacterial system to make dsRNAs that can interfere with the pathogens’ vital functions that are required for infection or causing diseases, releasing and purifying the dsRNAs from bacterial cells, testing optimum conditions to apply the dsRNA onto soybean for the best effectiveness, and conducting the greenhouse studies to determine the minimum concentration each of the dsRNAs is needed to achieve a successful suppression of pathogen infection or disease symptom development. In the past year, we have significant progresses in achieving all the objectives listed in the proposal: we selected at least 3-4 genes from each of the pathogens and designed 3-7 sets of primers to clone different regions for each of these genes into the bacterial expression system for dsRNA production. We have cloned most of the regions of the targeted genes and optimized the conditions for dsRNA production and purification. In addition, we have optimized foliar dsRNA application conditions using the dsRNA we previous produced in the lab. In summary, we have completed the listed major deliverables #1 (dsRNA production) and #2 (optimize the conditions for dsRNA delivery). Currently, we are using the produced dsRNA to test their effectiveness on reducing pathogen infection under growth chamber conditions (deliverable #3) and we will summarize our data in the form of manuscript for publication (deliverable #4) shortly after that is completed.