author(s)
Shahanaz and Vinay K Kalia

abstract
The pink bollworm, Pectinophora gossypiella is one of the devastating pests of cotton and has become a major threat to Bt cotton growers across India since 2015. To study the possibility of any genetic variation among the 16 populations of P. gossypiella, experiments were conducted with a promising nuclear protein-encoding gene Actin (β ACT). The phylogenetic tree constructed depicts that there is low genetic variation among populations of P. gossypiella. A neighbor-joining tree constructed based on Tamura parameters of 3 β ACT gene sequences produced two clusters. The cluster diagram shows that a total of 16 populations grouped into two major clades. However, the P. gossypiella populations were separated by the Spodoptera frugiperda sequence, which shows a similarity of 91%. All populations were grouped into two major clades, each comprising 9 and 7. Negative value of Tajima's d indicates that population expansion or selection pressure on the population which lead to presence of an excess of low-frequency polymorphisms.