Unbiased Characterization of Anopheles Mosquito Blood Meals by Targeted High-Throughput Sequencing.

ABSTRACT: Understanding mosquito host choice is important for assessing vector competence or identifying disease reservoirs. Unfortunately, the availability of an unbiased method for comprehensively evaluating the composition of insect blood meals is very limited, as most current molecular assays only test for the presence of a few pre-selected species. These approaches also have limited ability to identify the presence of multiple mammalian hosts in a single blood meal. Here, we describe a novel high-throughput sequencing method that enables analysis of 96 mosquitoes simultaneously and provides a comprehensive and quantitative perspective on the composition of each blood meal. We validated in silico that universal primers targeting the mammalian mitochondrial 16S ribosomal RNA genes (16S rRNA) shou

SUBMITTER: Logue K 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4786206 | biostudies-literature | 2016 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature