16S rRNA Gene Based Identification Of Gut Bacteria from Field Collected Larvae of Helicoverpa armigera (lepidoptera:Noctuidae) from Tomato Ecosystem

Tomato fruit borer Helicoverpa armigera (Hübner) is a polyphagous pest of different host plants and has developed resistance to most of the insecticide groups. In order to know the gut microbial flora of the insecticide resistant field collected larvae of H. armigera, whole gut was dissected from the fourth to fifth instar larvae of the H. armigera and the culturable bacterial species were identified by sequence analysis of 16S rRNA gene. Altogether eleven bacterial species of different genera were identified were Stenotrophomonas sp., Enterococcus casseliflavus, Enterococcus sp., Enterococcus gallinarum, Enterococcus feacium, Bravundimonas diminuta, Staphylococcus sp., Pseudomonas aeruginosa, Acinetobacter calcoaceticus, Bacillus subtilis and Rhodococcus sp., of which genera Enterococcus were found to be predominant. The nucleotide sequences of 11 isolates were submitted to NCBI-Gen Bank and accession numbers (HM446252, HM446253, HM446254, HM446256, HM446258, HM446260, HM446261, HM446263, HM446264, HM446265, and HM446266) were obtained.