Rice yellow mottle virus (RYMV) is responsible for devastating losses in African rice production—and incidence of the disease is on the rise. Conventional approaches for breeding RYMV-resistant cultivars have proved impractical, but in this issue, Pinto et al. (p. 702) describe an effective transgenic approach. Using the concept of pathogen-derived resistance, they introduced transgenes encoding fragments of the RYMV genome, producing transgenic lines with a high degree of resistance to RYMV.