Skip to main content
Entomology 2020 Main banner
Icon Legend
This session is not in your schedule.
This session is in your schedule. Click again to remove it.
Presentation Icons
Plenary
Plenary
Livestream
Livestream
On-Demand
On-Demand
Student Competition
Student Competition
Video Chat
Video Chat
Panel Discussion
Panel Discussion
Mixer
Mixer
Poster Icons
Poster
Poster
Student Competition
Student Competition
ViewAttendees 9

P-IE

10-Minute Paper

10-min: P-IE, IPM

Development of new diagnostic assays for Anthonomus spp. weevils using SNP data and museum specimens

On-Demand
On-Demand
The boll weevil (Anthonomus grandis Boheman) is an infamous cotton pest in the United States and one of the most important pests of cotton in Central and South America. Management of boll weevil relies on diagnostic assays of weevils collected in pheromone-baited monitoring traps. However, multiple Anthonomus species and subspecies will come to these traps, and current assays for taxon identification (classical taxonomy, morphometrics, COI assays) are not always reliable and can be time intensive. These methods can often lead to ambiguous determinations, especially when the sample is in poor condition, complicating decision-making for management. Improper diagnoses can lead to losses in revenue due to unnecessary and costly spraying and can trigger quarantines leading to losses in trade. Conversely, determinations failing to recognize pest infestations could lead to monumentally costly establishment of pest populations. Therefore, a new suite of molecular diagnostic tools that can rapidly and accurately identify Anthonomus spp. and sspp. is needed. In this presentation, we will first describe how we employed ddRADseq to generate a large SNP dataset that has been used to develop an assay that can distinguish between Anthonomus grandis sspp. Next, we will detail how we used the same dataset to design a probe set that could amplify homologous loci in other Anthonomus spp. Finally, we will discuss progress toward the species diagnostic assays using a low DNA input approach to attempt to recover these loci from museum specimens.