Mitchell Andrew, Gopurenko David
Australian Museum Research Institute, Australian Museum, Sydney, NSW, Australia.
NSW Department of Primary Industries, Wagga Wagga, NSW, Australia.
PLoS One. 2016 Aug 10;11(8):e0160895. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0160895. eCollection 2016.
Helicoverpa and Heliothis species include some of the world's most significant crop pests, causing billions of dollars of losses globally. As such, a number are regulated quarantine species. For quarantine agencies, the most crucial issue is distinguishing native species from exotics, yet even this task is often not feasible because of poorly known local faunas and the difficulties of identifying closely related species, especially the immature stages. DNA barcoding is a scalable molecular diagnostic method that could provide the solution to this problem, however there has been no large-scale test of the efficacy of DNA barcodes for identifying the Heliothinae of any region of the world to date. This study fills that gap by DNA barcoding the entire heliothine moth fauna of Australia, bar one rare species, and comparing results with existing public domain resources. We find that DNA barcodes provide robust discrimination of all of the major pest species sampled, but poor discrimination of Australian Heliocheilus species, and we discuss ways to improve the use of DNA barcodes for identification of pests.
棉铃虫属和实夜蛾属的一些物种是世界上最重要的农作物害虫，在全球造成了数十亿美元的损失。因此，其中一些是受管制的检疫性物种。对于检疫机构来说，最关键的问题是区分本地物种和外来物种，但由于当地动物区系鲜为人知，以及难以识别亲缘关系密切的物种，尤其是幼虫阶段，即使这项任务也往往不可行。DNA条形码是一种可扩展的分子诊断方法，可能为这个问题提供解决方案，然而，迄今为止，尚未对DNA条形码识别世界任何地区实夜蛾亚科的功效进行大规模测试。本研究通过对澳大利亚除一种稀有物种外的所有实夜蛾科蛾类动物进行DNA条形码分析，并将结果与现有的公共领域资源进行比较，填补了这一空白。我们发现，DNA条形码能够对所有采样的主要害虫物种进行可靠的鉴别，但对澳大利亚的黑夜蛾属物种鉴别能力较差，并且我们讨论了改进使用DNA条形码识别害虫的方法。
