Our objective is to fully understand the heterogeneity of individual arthropods within a species or population and relate this to ecological and environmental factors in agricultural and neighbouring vegetation systems.

In the last decade markers based on ribosomal and mitochondrial genes, IGS fingerprints, microsatellite markers and proteomics, have been developed and applied to agricultural pests and their relatives. The results allow us to identify important factors for effective pest management such as the range of host plants colonised by a particular pest and the likely origins of pests in both evolutionary and contemporary timescales. These can be further related to other properties of species, populations or individuals such as their efficiency in transmitting viruses or ability to overcome control measures such as resistant cultivars.

Molecular biological approaches have been used to determine the relationship between two important raspberry flower/fruit beetles and their close relatives. This work also showed that these beetles are infected with the bacterial endosymbiont Wolbachia.

• Examples of approaches