Mzwandile Thabani Hadebe1 and Moses
Okpeku1*
1Discipline of Genetics, School of Life Sciences,
University of KwaZulu-Natal, Westville, Durban 4000, South Africa.
*Corresponding Author:okpekum@ukzn.ac.za.
MH:hadebemzwandile160@gmail.com.
MO: okpekum@ukzn.ac.za.
Abstract
Anopheles mosquitos are the primary vectors for the rapid spread
of malaria in Limpopo, South Africa, negatively impacting all malaria
elimination agenda; particularly for a country with vector control as
one of the major malaria elimination strategies. The implementation of
vector control strategies, however, depends on the accurate
identification of mosquito vectors, which has been lacking in Limpopo as
a result of earlier studies that mainly relied on morphological
identification of vectors, which has numerous drawbacks that lead to
misidentification of mosquitoes, thus resulting in the development and
assignment of ineffective control strategies. All this together set back
elimination strategies and
programs. The present study
therefore aimed to molecularly identify mosquitoes collected from
various regions within Limpopo province. This was accomplished by
examining genetic composition of mosquitos from different regions within
Limpopo province, using molecular genetics techniques such as 18S
rDNA-based PCR analysis, 18S rDNA sequencing, etc. This investigation
was successful since 18S rDNA was able to identify every one of the 42
mosquito samples that were analysed, revealing that the samples belonged
to 7 different Anopheles species and the majority of the species
were molecularly demonstrated to have been misidentified
morphologically. The outcomes of the molecular analysis, which involved
comparing the query sequences to the sequences in GenBank, were
supported by the close relationship among mosquitoes of the same species
in maximum likelihood trees and the presence of high to 100% bootstrap
support values, giving confidence to conclude that mosquitoes of the
same species under study are genetically related. Due to a number of
constraints covered in this study, morphological identification of
mosquitoes is prone to misidentification of species, hence genetic
characterization is recommended to be used as a confirmatory approach in
the identification of the species.
Keywords : Anopheles , Multiple Alignment sequencing,
Phylogenetic construction, 18S rDNA, Genetic variation.