Reliable molecular identification of nine tropical whitefly species

Abstract

The identification of whitefly species in adult stage is problematic. Morphological differentiation of pupae is one of the better methods for determining identity of species, but it may vary depending on the host plant on which they develop which can lead to misidentifications and erroneous naming of new species. Polymerase chain reaction (PCR) fragment amplified from the mitochondrial cytochrome oxidase I (COI) gene is often used for mitochondrial haplotype identification that can be associated with specific species. Our objective was to compare morphometric traits against DNA barcode sequences to develop and implement a diagnostic molecular kit based on a RFLP-PCR method using the COI gene for the rapid identification of whiteflies. This study will allow for the rapid diagnosis of the diverse community of whiteflies attacking plants of economic interest in Colombia. It also provides access to the COI sequence that can be used to develop predator conservation techniques by establishing which predators have a trophic linkage with the focal whitefly pest species.

Portieragives new clues on the evolutionary history of whiteflies

“…Aleurolobus, Aleurotrachelus, and Bemisia were monophyletic in our study and also in previous analysis (Ovalle et al, 2014), in contrast to their paraphyletic status reported in Manzari and Quicke (2006). The only Aleurothrixus species in our dataset grouped with the Aleurotrachelus species, suggesting that this genus could be synonymized with the latter.…”

“…Interestingly, the Singhiella-Aleurolobus-Bemisia clade was recovered with reasonable support. Similarly, Ovalle et al (2014) used the 5' mtCOI to explore the relationship between 8 genera (20 taxa). Again, while deeper nodes were not fully resolved, more recent nodes were well supported.…”

“…To the best of our knowledge, only four published studies have tried to establish broad phylogenetic relationships among the different whitefly genera. Three of them were based on molecular phylogenetics (Thao and Baumann, 2004a;Ovalle et al, 2014;Dickey et al, 2015) while the third utilized morphological cladistics (Manzari and Quicke, 2006). Thao and Baumann (2004a) used Portiera's 16S and 23S rRNA genes to classify 20 species from 12 genera and reported some incongruence between taxonomical names and molecular data.…”

“…Thao and Baumann (2004a) used Portiera's 16S and 23S rRNA genes to classify 20 species from 12 genera and reported some incongruence between taxonomical names and molecular data. Both Ovalle et al (2014) and Dickey et al (2015) works used the 5' region of the mitochondrial cytochrome oxidase 1 (mtCOI ) barcode to classify 20 species from 9 genera and 104 species from 24 genera, respectively. However, both studies showed low support at inner nodes and highlighted the limited capacity of the mtCOI barcode to establish inter-genera relationships.…”

DNA barcodes for bio-surveillance: regulated and economically important arthropod plant pests

“…Cryptic species have important implications for taxonomic, evolutionary, and biodiversity studies, but their presence in pest taxa also has economic and regulatory implications (Piffaretti et al 2013;Rebijith et al 2014). Several studies have considered the impact of cryptic species on pest management (Frewin et al 2014;Ovalle et al 2014), biological control strategies (Derocles et al 2015), the detection of invasive species (Blacket et al 2015;Li et al 2015), and quarantine inspections (Kang et al 2015). The most obvious implications of DNA barcoding relate to its capacity to discriminate the members of cryptic species complexes (Robe et al 2013).…”