Abstract
BackgroundAnopheles cruzii is the primary human Plasmodium vector in southern and southeastern Brazil. The distribution of this mosquito follows the coast of the Brazilian Atlantic Forest. Previous studies indicated that An. cruzii is a complex of cryptic species.ResultsA multilocus approach using six loci, three circadian clock genes and three encoding ribosomal proteins, was implemented to investigate in more detail the genetic differentiation between the An. cruzii populations from Santa Catarina (southern Brazil) and Bahia States (northeastern Brazil) that represent two sibling species. The analysis revealed very high FST values and fixed differences between the two An. cruzii sibling species in all loci, irrespective of their function. An Isolation with Migration model was fit to the data using the IM program. The results reveal no migration in either direction and allowed a rough estimate of the divergence time between the two sibling species.ConclusionsPopulation genetics analysis of An. cruzii samples from two Brazilian localities using a multilocus approach confirmed that they represent two different sibling species in this complex. The results suggest that the two species have not exchanged migrants since their separation and that they possibly diverged between 1.1 and 3.6 million years ago, a period of intense climatic changes.
Highlights
Anopheles cruzii is the primary human Plasmodium vector in southern and southeastern Brazil
A recent analysis of genetic differentiation using the timeless gene among An. cruzii populations from southern, southeastern and northeastern Brazil indicated that the population from Itaparica, Bahia State is a different species [6]
Polymorphism and divergence between Florianópolis and Itaparica One of the assumptions of the Isolation with Migration model used in this study is the absence of recombination within the studied loci
Summary
Anopheles cruzii is the primary human Plasmodium vector in southern and southeastern Brazil. The distribution of this mosquito follows the coast of the Brazilian Atlantic Forest. Anopheles cruzii (Diptera: Culicidae) is the primary vector of human and simian malaria parasites in southern and southeastern Brazil [1,2]. A recent analysis of genetic differentiation using the timeless gene among An. cruzii populations from southern, southeastern and northeastern Brazil indicated that the population from Itaparica, Bahia State (northeastern Brazil) is a different species [6]. A multilocus analysis using six different nuclear gene fragments was performed comparing two populations of An. cruzii (Florianópolis and Itaparica), representing respectively the southeastern and northeastern sibling species. This study aimed to verify whether the differentiation in circadian genes is higher than the divergence in constitutive loci, such as the ribosomal protein genes Rp49, RpS29 and RpS2
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