Abstract: Wolbachia are obligate intracellular symbionts that infect reproductive tissues of a wide range of arthropod species. Previous reports showed that arthropods carried Wolbachia belonging to supergroup A and B, but Bemisia tabaci mainly harbored Wolbachia of supergroup B. In this study, 17 natural populations of B. tabaci collected from Fujian province were firstly molecularly identified based on rDNA-ITS1 sequences, and then specific primers of Wolbachia 16S rDNA were used to amplify a target region through polymerase chain reaction, which was used for restriction fragment length polymorphism analysis. The results demonstrated that whitefly populations from areas including Minghou, Pintan, Nanping, Laizhou, Zhangping and Shaxian of Fujian province belonged to non-B biotypes, while the other populations belonged to B biotype. Wolbachia superinfection was commonly detected in non-B biotypes of B. tabaci based on PCR-RFLP analysis, while in B biotype of B. tabaci only supergroup A Wolbachi a infection was found. These data, based on dense sampling, further verified that Wolbachia infection was closely related to the biotypes of B. tabaci, suggesting that Wolbachia might play a role in population differentiation of B. tabaci.

Key words: Bemisia tabaci, population differentiation, Wolbachia, superinfection, ribosomal DNA, PCR-RFLP