author(s)
Divya Srivastava and Dr. Adesh Kumar

abstract
Helicoverpa armigera feed on a wide range of many important cultivated crops hence has become an economic important insect pest. It damages the entire crop by boring the pod or fruits of crops hence named as pod borer as it bores the chick pea pod, cotton and other crops so commonly known as gram pod borer. Pod borer is the most polyphagous and cosmopolitan pest species. In this present work endospore forming bacteria were isolated by sodium acetate and heat shock methods. These isolates were then screened to study the presence of endospores and crystal structures within the bacterial cells with the help of malachite green and CBB staining respectively. The positive strains were selected for cell based insecticidal test where we feed the entire bacteria cells to pod borer to detect their insecticidal properties. All of the potent insecticidal bacteria were gram positive rod shaped bacteria and other biochemical properties resembling with Bacillus spp. as partial identification results. As we got four potent insecticidal bacteria out of 17 isolates of endospore forming bacteria that were named as D₁, D2, D₃ and D₄. These results are showing that it is possible to get insecticidal strains naturally present in soil samples, which we can isolate to produce microbial cell based bio-control as an eco-friendly and cost effective bioinsecticide.