ABSTRACT The tomato leaf miner, Tuta absoluta (Meyrick, 1917), is one of the economically important and invasive insect pests that feeds on tomato and other solanaceous plants. Samples of the tomato leaf miner were collected from 10 different locations in India. The presence of reproductive endosymbiotic bacteria, such as Arsenophonus, Cardinium, Spiroplasma, and Wolbachia , was studied in the wild and laboratory‐reared T. absoluta samples. Based on the PCR assays, Arsenophonus, Cardinium , and Spiroplasma infections were not detected in any of the T. absoluta populations, whereas Wolbachia infection in the range of 42.8%–91.7% was observed in the collected samples. The Wolbachia‐ positive samples of the wild and laboratory‐reared T. absoluta were further characterized for strain genotyping using multi‐locus sequence typing (MLST) and wsp approaches. Concatenated MLST and wsp gene sequence analysis revealed that a single dominant Wolbachia strain, ST41, existed in all T. absoluta populations except in T. absoluta samples from southern India, which showed two Wolbachia strains, ST41 and a new ST367. Bayesian inference phylogenetic analysis showed that the Wolbachia‐ positive T. absoluta samples clustered into two supergroups (A and B) based on concatenated MLST and wsp sequences. Tuta absoluta samples having ST41 clustered in supergroup B, whereas ST367 grouped under supergroup A. High prevalence of Wolbachia and its low genetic diversity in natural populations of T. absoluta could be helpful in the development of Wolbachia ‐based management strategies.
Hadapad et al. (Fri,) studied this question.