Abstract: Amplified fragment length polymorphism (AFLP) is a new and powerful molecular genetic marker for DNA fingerprinting based on selective amplification of total DNA restriction fragments. AFLP is a fast and economic technique. It needs little template DNA for analysis and can generate fingerprints of any DNA without much prior sequence knowledge. Data produced by AFLP are reproducible, reliable and highly informative. However, AFLP has some disadvantages. AFLP markers are dominant, and thus can not distinguish heterogeneous loci from homologous loci. Therefore, they provide less precise estimates of population genetic variability and have limited statistical power for detecting population genetic structure. Technically, AFLP is quite complicated and often involves the use of radioactive isotopes. Also，AFLP requires the high quality template DNA. In order to overcome these limitations, some related and improved methods have been developed, such as AFRP, SAMPL, DALP and TE-AFLP. So far, the application of AFLP technique in entomology is in its infancy. It has been mainly used in the identification of biotypes, analyses of population genetics and construction of linkage genetic maps. With further improvement of this technique, it will be more widely employed in entomology.

Key words: insect, AFLP, molecular genetic marker