Scientific publications

Insect pests are one of the major threats to agricultural activities. Chemical pesticides (insecticides) are commonly used to combat them. However, use of chemical pesticides has many disadvantages, the main ones are the toxicological effect on non-target objects, a decrease in biodiversity and resistance development in insect pests. A comprehensive insect pests control requires the knowledge of the populations features – their phenotypic and genotypic composition. Molecular genetic studies are becoming widely used in assessing populations stability, especially RT-qPCR methods. This method nevertheless needs careful selection of reference genes. Most studies identify genes which expression has changed in response to some stimulus, but little or no information is given about which genes were normalized to the target genes or whether the stability of the reference genes was previously assessed. This study was conducted on Musca domestica. With a short life cycle and high reproductive potential, the housefly often serves as a model organism for studying population processes and studying the mechanisms of insecticide resistance in insects. Current scientific databases lack information about the reference genes selection for studying the gene expression of the given object. In the study, four candidate-genes (RPS18, EF-1, 18S, GAPDH) were tested to assess transcript levels in three lines of the model organism Musca domestica. Analysis of the most stable reference genes for 55 samples was carried out in the RefFinder program, which uses several reference gene evaluation algorithms: Delta Ct, BestKeeper, NormFinder and geNorm. According to the study results, the EF-1 gene was found to be the most reliable.