ABSTRACT
The Indian lac insect, Kerria lacca (Kerr) is an economically important insect yielding resin, dye and wax. Aprostocetus purpureus and Tachardiaephagus tachardiae are the two most important parasitoids of lac insect. Timely detection of the parasitoids infection is essential for their control. Host dissection and caging of adult lac insects are the existing methods for detection of parasitoids in lac culture. Host dissection is laborious, whereas caging helps to detect the presence of only adult but not immature stages of parasitoids. Hence in this study, a PCR based approach has been developed for detection of these two important parasitoids in lac insects. Primers were designed from the clustalW alignment of 18S rDNA sequences of parasitoids and lac insects. Subsequently, specificity of the primers was checked by PCR i.e., A. purpureus and T. tachardiae specific primers amplified only the respective parasitoid DNA but not lac insect and another parasitoid DNA. The PCR methods thus developed were also found to work with field collected infected lac insect samples and were able to differentiate infected lac insects from the uninfected ones.