Study of Secondary Endosymbionts of Whiteflies Collected from Cotton Growing Districts of Punjab, Pakistan

Abstract

Whitefly is the insect vector for cotton leaf curl disease. Like many arthropods, whitefly possess different primary and secondary endosymbionts depending on ecological zone and biotype. These endosymbionts play important role in several metabolic processes including reproduction. In this study, endosymbiont specific primers were used to check their presence in whiteflies. Each endosymbiont primer set amplify a PCR product of specific size and thus amplification of PCR product shows its presence in extracted DNA. Amplified DNA was checked using sodium channel gene-specific primers as internal control and the presence of endosymbiont was confirmed using 16S primers. We found multiple infections of endosymbionts in each district followed by confirmation through different molecular approaches. Our results confirmed the presence of multiple/diverse endosymbionts in whitefly samples collected from Punjab, Pakistan. The results would be helpful to correlate the occurrence of whitefly biotypes and disease intensity in different regions of Pakistan.