MOLECULAR IDENTIFICATION OF THRIPS SPECIES, WHICH INFESTS THE GREENHOUSE VEGETABLES INCLUDING EGGPLANT IN THE CENTRAL AGRARIAN REGION OF MONGOLIA

Abstract

In Mongolia, the first record of onion thrips was informed in vegetable fields by D. Tsedev (Tsendsuren et al., 1979), since that has no detailed research materials relating to the identification of thrips and the Thysanoptera group observed in different crop fields. In 2017–2019, we have taken the thrips samples from the following areas, which spread on eggplant, cucumber, tomato, paprika, and beans grown in the greenhouses of the Agropark research and training center, the greenhouses of the Bornuur soum in the Tuv province and the Mandal soum of Selenge province and onion field accordingly. The mitochondrial COI gene of selected insect samples has been used for species identification. For the nucleotide sequence of the mitochondrial COI area of the insects, we amplified with universal LCO1490 and HCO2198 primers. We have illustrated the COI gene fragments of thrips samples. For building a phylogenetic tree was constructed using the Neighbor-Joining method. A bootstrap test with 1000 replications was carried out. The evolutionary distances were calculated using Tamura’s three-parameter method. A phylogenetic tree was built for 14 sequences with a total length of 681bp nucleotides. When conducting phylogenetic analysis using the MEGA X program, it was displayed the phylogenetic origin of our samples in all inferred trees is the same as the Chinese species; Thrips tabaci (China – Zhejiang), which registered with MN036455 accession number in the gene bank of NCBI. According to these results, the sampled thrips were collected from various vegetables including eggplants in Mongolia identified as Thrips tabaci and we have registered it in the GenBank of NCBI under OP288232 accession number. Keywords. Eggplant damage, thrips species identification, COI gene, phylogenetic origin, PCR.