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Ag1000G - CAMEROON (AG1000G-CM-2)
Project: Ag1000G

Location: Cameroon (CM).

Mosquito

Partner study description

These samples were collected as part of a study which took place in Cameroon in Central Africa. The country is commonly referred to as “miniature Africa”, owing to the diversity of its climate, topography, landscape, and bio-ecological settings: arid savannas in the north gradually turn into rain forest in the south, along with highland areas, contribute to increase diversity of ecological settings. Anopheline mosquitoes were collected in 2005 from 64 locations covering a 1,500 km north-to-south transect that crossed all eco-geographical areas of Cameroon (1). Mosquito collection involved spraying aerosols of pyrethroid insecticides inside human dwellings, dead mosquitoes were retrieved from white sheets that were laid on the floor. Anopheline mosquitoes were identified using morphological identification keys (2, 3). Ovaries from half-gravid An. gambiae s.l. females were dissected and stored in Carnoy’s fixative solution (absolute ethanol:glacial acetic acid 3:1) for cytogenetic analyses. Carcasses were stored individually in tubes containing a desiccant and kept at -20C until they were processed for molecular analysis. All half-gravid specimens collected in each village were identified to species and molecular forms using PCR-RFLP (4).

See Simard et al. (1) >for further details of this study

1. Frédéric Simard, Diego Ayala, Guy Kamdem, Marco Pombi, Joachim Etouna, Kenji Ose, Jean-Marie Fotsing, Didier Fontenille, Nora J Besansky, and Carlo Costantini. Ecological niche partitioning between anopheles gambiae molecular forms in cameroon: the ecological side of speciation. BMC Ecol., 9:17, 2009. https://doi.org/10.1186/1472-6785-9-17

2. M. T. Gillies and Botha de Meillon. The Anophelinae of Africa south of the Sahara (Ethiopian zoogeographical region). South African Institute for Medical Research, Johannesburg, 2 edition, 1968.

3. M. T. Gillies and M. Coetzee. A supplement to the anophelinae of Africa south of the Sahara (Afrotropical Region). South African Institute For Medical Research, Johannesburg, 1987.

4. C. Fanello, F. Santolamazza, and A. della Torre. Simultaneous identification of species and molecular forms of the anopheles gambiae complex by pcr-rflp. Med Vet Entomol, 16:461–464, December 2002. https://doi.org/10.1046/j.1365-2915.2002.00393.x

Contributors

Frédéric Simard (frederic.simard@ird.fr) UMR MIVEGEC, Univ. Montpellier, CNRS, IRD, Montpellier, France.

Diego Ayala (diego.ayala@ird.fr) UMR MIVEGEC, Univ. Montpellier, CNRS, IRD, Montpellier, France.

Nora J. Besansky (nbesansk@nd.edu) Eck Institute for Global Health & Department of Biological Sciences, University of Notre Dame, IN 46556, USA.

Carlo Costantini (carlo.costantini@ird.fr) UMR MIVEGEC, Univ. Montpellier, CNRS, IRD, Montpellier, France.