Thirteen fungal isolates, having characteristics similar to Beauveria bassiana, were isolated from field soils of Punjab, India, on Beauveria-specific selective medium (BS medium). Molecular screening of the B. bassiana isolates, using PCR amplification with B. bassiana-specific primer and nucleotide sequence analysis of ITS region, confirmed only three isolates as B. bassiana (now named as BbR1, BbR2, and BbR3) along with MTCC 2028 reference isolate. Comparative RAPD-PCR amplification with ten different RAPD primers showed that all the three isolates were closely related. Genetic relatedness dendrogram developed, using RAPD-PCR data by UPGMA, measured the quantitative description of genetic diversity and showed that the standard isolate MTCC2028 was 58% similar to new isolates. B. bassiana isolates achieved their maximum growth during the optimum incubation period of 7 days. Significant mortality rates of the tobacco caterpillar, Spodoptera litura (Fabricius) (Lepidoptera: Noctuidae), were recorded at all the tested concentrations of conidial suspensions (10³ to 10⁷ conidia ml⁻¹) of B. bassiana. BbR2 was found to be the most potential local isolate, causing the maximum mortality (83.33%) of S. litura, with LC₅₀ value of 935.663 conidia ml⁻¹, followed by BbR3 (74.33%), BbR1 (72.22%), and BbM1 (67.12%) isolates.

Hoppers belonging to Amritodus spp. and Idioscopus spp. have been reported infesting mango trees in India. In this study, the mango hoppers were collected from Patiala (Nabha), Jalandhar and Ludhiana districts of Punjab for their molecular identification using DNA barcoding. The mitochondrial cytochrome oxidase I (mtCOI) gene from these samples was PCR amplified, cloned in vector and sequenced. The DNA sequences obtained were subjected to analysis through BLASTn programme of NCBI and all three samples were identified as Amritodus atkinsoni with 99% similarity of mtCOI gene sequence. Sequence alignment of 624 bp mtCOI of Amritodus populations showed the changes in nucleotides at 4 different positions. The phylogenetic tree was prepared for mtCOI gene sequences of different populations (number) of A. atkinsoni (1), A. brevistylus (2), Idioscopus niveosparus (1), I. nagpurensis (3) and I. clypealis (1) and populations from Punjab. The tree revealed two Clades, i.e. first corresponding to A. atkinsonii and A. brevistylus, while, Clade 2 consist of three species of Idioscopus with three sub-clusters for each I. clypealis, I. niveosparus and I. nagpurensis. Nucleotide pairwise distances ranged from 0.002 to 0.199. The analysis revealed very low genetic variations among the south and north Indian populations of A. atkinsoni.