Genetic Differentiation of Brown Planthopper Nilaparvata lugens (Stål) Populations in Asia

Genetic Differentiation of Brown Planthopper in Asia

Abstract

Brown Planthopper is one of the economically important rice pests that cause several
crop failures in Asian countries. Unfortunately, Brown Planthopper could migrate to
neighboring countries to generate interpopulation breeding, thus further increasing the
gene flow and spreading insecticide resistance. This research aimed to understand the
genetic differentiation of Brown Planthopper among all Asian populations. This study
used two COI sequences from Malang, Indonesia, and 25 sequences from GenBank
to analyze the genetic structure with phylogenetic tree and haplotype network. The
uncorrected pairwise distance result showed that the Brown Planthopper population
in Asia has a relatively low genetic distance. We also found that the Brown Planthopper population was clustered based on the geographical region of South Asia, East
Asia-Mainland South East Asia, and Indonesia. Thus, we concluded that the migration
of Brown Planthopper was limited to East Asia and Mainland South East Asia only.
Further studies are needed to confirm the migration route of Brown Planthopper in
South Asia and Southeast Asia
Keywords: BPH, Genetic differentiation, Haplotype network, Phylogenetic