Molecular identification of Araecerus fasciculatus and its endosymbiotic bacteria

Abstract

Araecerus fasciculatus are one of the important storage pests of cassava, associated with a wide variety ofbacterial endosymbionts that confer many ecologically relevant traits to the host insect. Endosymbioticbacteria (ESB) play a vital role even in the physiology of the host, hence identification of ESB associatedwith the storage pests will help to develop important strategies for the management of the noxiouspest. In the present study molecular characterization of the Araecerus fasciculatus and endosymbioticbacteria associated with them, was done. By molecular characterization they were identified as Araecerusfasciculatus and sequences were deposited at NCBI with accession no OR415335. Further, the genomicDNA was isolated from each of the EPB isolates and PCR amplification of 16S rRNA gene was carriedout using universal primers. The 16S rDNA gene sequences of endosymbiotic bacterial isolates weregenerated by sequencing the PCR product and were aligned with each other by using BioEDIT software.The nucleotide sequences were compared with those in the NCBI databases using the Basic LocalAlignment Search and were identified as were confirmed as Bacillus megaterium. The taxonomy had beenrecently changed and was renamed Priestia megaterium, which is a new separate genus from Bacillus. The16S rRNA gene sequences were also deposited at NCBI database with accession no OR418413. Fromthe aligned sequences phylogenetic tree was constructed by the Neighbor-Joining method using MEGAversion 11.