author(s)
Sunitha ND, Srikant S Chavan and Abhilash AN

abstract
Sromatium barbatum (Fabricius) has wide distribution from its native Asia. Being a dry wood infesting species, it is capable of developing in more than 350 host species including conifer and hardwood trees as well as bamboo and some woody vines. During 2019, S. Barbatum was observed for the first time infesting grape vine orchards of Northern Karnataka (India). Nevertheless, no further information is hitherto available from other parts of the world on its pest status on grapevines except from State Maharashtra (India).Morphological data are usually time consuming and need specialists, DNA bar-coding techniques are a uniform and practical method of species identification of insects. Therefore, we characterized S. barbatum at the molecular level and developed species specific DNA barcodes by using mitochondrial cytochrome oxidase gene. The sequences of S. barbatum have been deposited to the NCBI with accession numbers MT280795 and MT280796.Studies on other aspects of the pest are under progress.