Abstract:
The mosquito microbiota is a critical determinant of mosquito life history. It is therefore a
target for novel vector control strategies like paratransgenesis. However, the microbiota in Anopheles
funestus, a major African malaria vector, is poorly characterized. Thus, the study aimed to investigate
the overall bacterial landscape in the salivary glands, ovaries and midguts of three laboratory strains
of An. funestus differing in insecticide-resistant phenotype by sequencing the V3–V4 hypervariable
region of bacterial 16S rRNA genes. When examining alpha diversity, the salivary glands harbored
significantly more bacteria in terms of species richness and evenness compared to ovaries and midguts.
On the strain level, the insecticide-susceptible FANG strain had significantly lower bacterial diversity
than the insecticide-resistant FUMOZ and FUMOZ-R strains. When looking at beta diversity, the
compositions of microbiota between the three tissues as well as between the strains were statistically
different. While there were common bacteria across all three tissues and strains of interest, each tissue
and strain did exhibit differentially abundant bacterial genera. However, overall, the top five most
abundant genera across all tissues and strains were Elizabethkingia, Acinetobacter, Aeromonas, Cedecea
and Yersinia. The presence of shared microbiota suggests a core microbiota that could be exploited for
paratransgenesis efforts.
