The white-backed planthopper (WBPH), Sogatella furcifera (Horváth) is a serious pest causing grievous damage to rice plants. In the present study, inter-simple sequence repeats were employed to investigate the genetic diversity of 108 samples from 27 WBPH geographic populations in China. Ten primers were screened out with 147 amplified bands, average percentage of polymorphic bands, polymorphic information content, and marker index were 78.9, 0.456, and 6.753% respectively. The results indicated that genetic diversity was different among populations, but genetic variation was as low as 0.2% among the populations and as high as 99.8% within the same geographic population. Among the examined WBPH populations, genetic distances were weakly correlated to geographic distance, and there was no correlation between genetic identity and elevation. Cluster analysis showed that the 27 WBPH populations studied could be lumped into four clusters, with which the results of principal coordinate analysis (were almost consistent. In conclusion, the molecular genetic data demonstrated that the region consisting of Yunnan, Guizhou, Guangdong, and Guangxi was the first landing area of WBPH in its migrating process from overwintering sites to China.
Keywords: ISSR-PCR; genetic diversity; geographic population; white-backed planthopper.
© The Author 2014. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Entomological Society of America.