Morphological and Molecular Identification of Jujube Fruit Fly Carpomya incompleta (Becker, 1903) (Diptera: Tephritidae) in southeast Iraq

Abstract

An accurate identification of an insect is essential for the effective pest management program. However, due to the restrictions of phenotypic identification, molecular process (e.g. DNA barcoding) is used to overcome some of these limitations. The present paper was aimed to identify the Jujube fruit fly by morphological characters of the adults and molecular DNA barcoding of the larval stage in southeast Iraq. The adults was morphologically identified as Carpomyia incompleta (Becker, 1903) (Diptera: Tephritidae). Results of the molecular method revealed that the mitochondrial COI – COII marker was successfully identified immature stage of the species. The sequence analysis results identified the specimens (AHL1 and AHL2) as C. incompleta. Sequences of the specimens were recorded in The US National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) under accession numbers (ON045002.1 and ON045003.1, respectively. These results were consistent with the phenotypic identification of the Jujube fruit flies.