Agricultural Research Journal

Most of the world’s poorest smallholders depend on tropical roots and tuber crops as their principal source of food and nutrition. Sucking pests like whiteflies are major limiting factors in their production. Although whiteflies are important pests of tuber crops, their taxonomic diversity is poorly understood in these crops. As DNA barcoding is an effective tool for resolving species complexes and analyzing species distributions, the approach was used to analyze genetic diversity in the whitefly species infesting tuber crops such as cassava (Manihot esculenta), sweetpotato (Ipomoea batatas) and arrowroot (Maranta arundinacea). Among the whiteflies characterized, a ‘distinct’ genetic variant/ biotype was identified as a pest in sweetpotato and is found to be quite different when compared with all available 44 whitefly genetic variants of Bayesian phylogenetic tree inferred from mtCOI data using the GTR+G model.