ABSTRACT: The cotton bollworm (Helicoverpa armigera, Lepidoptera: Noctuidae) is a globally distributed agricultural pest. When conducting expression analysis of its functional genes, appropriate reference genes should be selected to ensure the reliability of the results. In this study, five algorithms including Delta Ct, GeNorm, Normfinder, BestKeeper, and RefFinder were used to evaluate the expression stability of eleven candidate reference genes under different developmental stages, larval tissues, adult sexes, plant secondary substance stresses, and insecticide treatments in H. armigera. The candidate genes included Actin, Tubulin, EF-1α, RPS3, RPS15, RPL27, RPL32, 28S, GAPDH, SOD, and TRX. The reliability
