For anyone interested in metabarcoding mosquitos for vector and pathogen surveillance, here’s a recent study (possibly the first) demonstrating the use of @nanopore technologies and DNA metabarcoding for surveying mosquito vectors in bulk samples. A few nice snippets: 🦟Using R10.3 flow cells, the authors report that “mosquito species-level identifications were highly congruent between MinION and Illumina (93% overlap)” 🦟The utilization of CO₂ gas cylinders resulted in a roughly two-fold increase in the average number of mosquito species captured per sample” 🦟 Results show that dissecting and pooling only the specimen heads to create a bulk sample did not improve species detection”... “Consequently, for future mosquito biosurveillance applications, we recommend pooling whole specimens without dissection to reduce processing time”. The study also found some promising indications that this method could be used for surveillance of mosquito hosts and pathogens. You can read the open access article here: Loh et al. (2024). Metabarcoding mosquitoes: MinION sequencing of bulk samples gives accurate species profiles for vector surveillance (Culicidae). Frontiers in Tropical Diseases, 5, 1223435. frontiersin.org/articles/10.33…