author(s)
Manoj Kumar, Pawan Kumar and Amit Seth

abstract
Present study was carried out to characterize the geometrid moth species at molecular level with the help of RAPD-PCR. Study was carried out in the Chirpine habitats in the subtropical region of Himachal Pradesh to access the systematic status of various geometrid groups. The study on geometrid moth systematics is very limited or negligible. Although the studies on geometrid moth have so far not been carried out by any workers in Chirpine forest in HP. PCR based methods like RAPD-PCR markers were used to find Phylogenetic relationship among the 10 geometrid moth species. RAPD decamer primers namely OPA 9 and OPA 13 showed good resolution and sufficient variation among the different moth species and produced a total of 23 polymorphic bands. The banding patterns were obtained and the dendrogram was drawn on the basis of presence and absence of bands. Jaccard’s co-relation coefficient between these moth species computed from combined data from two primers. Highest correlation observed between C. nora and O. marginata while lowest correlation coefficient between P. vararia and Z. apostolata. An analysis of molecular variance revealed significant difference within and between population variance. The unweighted pair group method of arithmetic mean (UPGMA) dendrogram based on Nei’s genetic distance group 10 genotype into two main clusters with 95% bootstrap value. These results indicate that RAPD-PCR technique is a powerful tool in the study of lepidopteran systematics and molecular taxonomy of cryptic moth species.