Journal article
Assessing quality of life-shortening Wolbachia-infected Aedes aegypti mosquitoes in the field based on capture rates and morphometric assessments
HL Yeap, JK Axford, J Popovici, NM Endersby, I Iturbe-Ormaetxe, SA Ritchie, AA Hoffmann
Parasites and Vectors | BMC | Published : 2014
Abstract
Background: Recent releases have been carried out with Aedes aegypti mosquitoes infected with the wMelPop mosquito cell-line adapted (wMelPop-CLA) strain of Wolbachia. This infection introduced from Drosophila provides strong blockage of dengue and other arboviruses but also has large fitness costs in laboratory tests. The releases were used to evaluate the fitness of released infected mosquitoes, and (following termination of releases) to test for any effects of wMelPop-CLA on wing size and shape when mosquitoes were reared under field conditions. Methods. We monitored gravid females via double sticky traps to assess the reproductive success of wMelPop-CLA-infected females and also sampled ..
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Funding Acknowledgements
We thank members of the Eliminate Dengue Project team who released mosquitoes and collected and identified BGS samples, and James Cook University staff, particularly Chris Paton, Gavin Omodei and Jack Ritchie who organized mosquito rearing and sticky trapping. We are grateful to members of the Eliminate Dengue team for helping with BGS collections. We also thank Katrina Billington for performing Wolbachia screening on the BGS-trap samples and Scott O'Neill of Monash University, Australia, for providing materials and laboratory space for processing the BGS-trap samples. We also thank the residents of Machans Beach who gave us permission to set up traps in their premises. This project was supported by grants from the Alfred-Nicholas Fellowship, the National Health and Medical Research Council of Australia, the Foundation for the National Institutes of Health, and the Australian Research Council.