An Autosomal Recessive Eye Colour Mutant of Melon Fruit Fly, Bactrocera cucurbitae (Coquillett)

Bactrocera cucurbitae is commonly known as melon fruit fly. It is a serious pest of several vegetable and fruit plants grown all across the world. The morphological features and damaging nature of this pest species have been well documented. However, the genetics of its any mutation that results into phenotypic variation has not been mentioned at all. While working on this fly, we found a golden brown eye mutant that showed eye colour variation from the wild type flies (bluish green eye coloured). By setting different crosses to get F1 and F2 flies, this has been ascertained that the eye colour mutation is autosomal recessive in nature. The preliminary results of some of the experiments involving mutants clearly depict the pleiotropic effect of this mutant gene.