Abstract
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.
Highlights
The Heliothinae is a cosmopolitan subfamily of Noctuidae containing some 365 described species worldwide [1]
We first present DNA barcode data obtained from decades-old museum specimens of Australian heliothines, add published data from GenBank to examine the utility of DNA barcoding for identification of both Australian heliothines and exotic species, those of quarantine significance
Collecting fresh specimens for a DNA study would have been an expensive and time consuming proposition since many of these species are distributed across the remote and relatively inaccessible arid zones of northern and central Australia. To circumvent both this difficulty and the challenging task of identifying freshly collected specimens, it was decided instead to build a core data set for Australian Heliothinae using only material examined by Matthews [1]. These specimens are housed in the Australian National Insect Collection (ANIC) and most were collected in the 1990s
Summary
The Heliothinae is a cosmopolitan subfamily of Noctuidae containing some 365 described species worldwide [1]. The larvae feed on flowers and fruits of herbaceous plants and include a number of the world's worst agricultural pests, such as Heliothis and Helicoverpa species. Pest control is dependent on rapid and accurate species identification, closely related species of Heliothinae may be impossible to distinguish without genitalic dissections. While the phylogeny of Heliothinae has been relatively well studied using both molecules and morphology [2, 3, 4, 5, 6], providing a robust framework for research on heliothine genomics and biology, species diagnostics has lagged behind. Identifying Helicoverpa species, for example, is at best a highly specialized task, and all too often impossible for the immature stages.
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