Abstract: The objective of this research was to study the composition of chemical elements and screen out the kinds of chemical elements with geographical characteristics in the body of adults of the brown planthopper (BPH), Nilaparvata lugens (Stal), in different geographic populations. Semi-quantitative analysis of inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICP-MS) was employed to determine the content of chemical elements existing in the body of adult BPH, and the differences in content of chemical elements among geographical populations were tested by means of analysis of variance (ANOVA) with nested design. Furthermore, full-quantitative analysis of ICP-MS and ANOVA with nested design was utilized to screen and verify the chemical elements which had significant differences among geographical populations but had no significant difference between years. The results showed that there were 57 chemical elements in body of adult BPH, and 27 kinds of chemical elements were filtered out by nested design ANOVA. Twelve elements (Ce, Nd, Pr, Sm, Gd, Th, V, Tl, Mo, Cs, Fe and Mn), which can be used to discriminate geographical origins of BPH, were screened out by means of ICP-MS full-quantitative detection analysis and nested design ANOVA. There are significant differences in content of some chemical elements among different geographical populations of BPH, which would contribute to recognizing the origin of long-distance immigration of BPH, and providing probably a new way to trace back geographic origins of BPH.

Key words: Nilaparvata lugens, geographical population, chemical element, semi-quantitative analysis, full quantitative analysis