The genetic structure of Asian corn borer, Ostrinia furnacalis, populations in China: haplotype variance in Northern populations and potential impact on management of resistance to transgenic maize

Asian corn borer, Ostrinia furnacalis (Guenée), is a severe pest that infests cultivated maize in the major production regions of China. Populations show genotype-by-environment variation in voltinism, such that populations with a single generation (univoltine) are fixed in Northern China where growing seasons are short. Low genetic differentiation was found among samples from 33 collection sites across China and one site from North Korea (n = 1,673) using variation at 6 nuclear microsatellite loci (ENA corrected global FST = 0.020; P-value < 0.05). Analysis of molecular variance (AMOVA) indicated that geographic region, number of generations or voltinism accounted for < 0.38% of the total genetic variation at nuclear loci and was corroborated by clustering of co-ancestries among genotypes using the program STRUCTURE. In contrast, a mitochondrial haplotype network identified four distinct clusters, where 70.5% of samples from univoltine populations were within a single group. Univ...