Abstract
BackgroundThe insecticides dichlorvos, paradichlorobenzene and naphthalene have been commonly used to eradicate pest insects from natural history collections. However, it is not known how these chemicals affect the DNA of the specimens in the collections. We thus tested the effect of dichlorvos, paradichlorobenzene and naphthalene on DNA of insects (Musca domestica) by extracting and amplifying DNA from specimens exposed to insecticides in two different concentrations over increasing time intervals.ResultsThe results clearly show that dichlorvos impedes both extraction and amplification of mitochondrial and nuclear DNA after relatively short time, whereas paradichlorobenzene and naphthalene do not.ConclusionCollections treated with paradichlorobenzene and naphthalene, are better preserved concerning DNA, than those treated with dichlorvos. Non toxic pest control methods should, however, be preferred due to physical damage of specimens and putative health risks by chemicals.
Highlights
The insecticides dichlorvos, paradichlorobenzene and naphthalene have been commonly used to eradicate pest insects from natural history collections
Natural history collections are an invaluable source of biological data [1,2,3]
It could be expected that Natural history collections will be much more important in molecular studies in the near future owing to; 1) difficulties to collect fresh biological material from many regions and the extinction of taxa due to habitat loss, and 2) the development of new highthroughput sequencing methods [10] and protocols that makes it possible to use these techniques for polymerase chain reaction (PCR)-product sequencing [11] and conducting extensive
Summary
The insecticides dichlorvos, paradichlorobenzene and naphthalene have been commonly used to eradicate pest insects from natural history collections. It is not known how these chemicals affect the DNA of the specimens in the collections. Biologists all over the world have been extracting ecological, morphological, phylogenetic, diversity and biogeographic data from museum specimens for decades, if not decennia [1] More recently these specimens are in frequent use for the extraction of DNA in e.g. molecular phylogenetic, population genetic and conservation genetic studies [5,6,7,8,9]. A variety of methods have been developed to eradicate the pest insects e.g. fumigation or other treatments with insecticides [12,13], traps [14,15,16], heating [17,18,19] or freezing of infested specimens [20,21,22] and modified atmosphere [23,24,25,26,27,28]
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