Molecular Analysis of Economically Important Fruit Flies (Tephritidae: Diptera) with Ultimate Aim of Managing the Flies
(A collaborative project with AIMST and UM)
In 1984, the National Agricultural Policy of Malaysia was established, and 15 types of fruits were identified for commercial development to meet the future domestic demand in the 21st century. The Department of Agriculture anticipates the acreage for fruit cultivation to reach 300,000 ha by 2020, while we project the fruit production to reach 2.7 tonnes. However, a major constraint to this rapidly developing and promising fruit industry in Malaysia is a group of endemic fruit flies (mainly Bactrocera spp., Dacinae, Tephritidae, Diptera) which not only cause heavy losses to fruit production in the field but also raise the cost of fruit production. Susceptible fruits include papaya, mango, banana, ciku, guava, cempedak, nangka, bitter gourd, chili, tomato and water melon. Up to now however, we still do not have an effective means of managing these fruit flies apart from insecticide applications which may pose health hazards, and bagging the fruits which is labor intensive.
This project thus involves developing a novel approach to improve the management of these pests. The first practical approach is to develop a molecular diagnostic tool to aid in species identification of the larval stage of the economically important fruit fly. This is to ensure that correct disinfestation steps could be carried out. This is essential to the export of fruits to other countries. For pest management, it might be possible to develop insects that can be sterilized by the presence of lethal genes in the germ line. Transformation of insects has been proven successful with transposable elements. Thus, transposable elements from the Malaysian fruit flies can be isolated for the same purpose. We propose to investigate the following: presence of mariner, hAT and piggyback tranposable elements in Malaysian fruit flies of economic importance. The molecular evolutionary history of the two most common fruit flies in Malaysia, B. papayae and B. carambolae based on the mitochondrial rDNA sequences will also be carried out.
Principal Investigators at MUST
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