Abstract
BackgroundMosquitoes are the deadliest animals in the world. Their ability to carry and spread diseases to humans causes millions of deaths every year. Due to the lack of efficient vaccines, the control of mosquito-borne diseases often relies on management of the vector. Traditional control methods such as source reduction and chemical insecticides, have proven not to be sufficient to prevent the proliferation and spread of mosquito populations. The sterile insect technique (SIT) is an additional control method that can be combined with other control tactics to suppress specific mosquito populations. The SIT requires the mass-rearing and release of sterile males that would induce sterility in the wild female population. Samples collected from the environment for laboratory colonization, as well as released males, should be free from mosquito-borne viruses (MBV). Therefore, efficient detection methods with defined detection limits for MBV are required. Although a one-step reverse transcriptase quantitative polymerase chain reaction (RT-qPCR) method was developed to detect arboviruses in human and mosquito samples, its detection limit in mosquito samples has yet to be defined. MethodsWe evaluated the detection sensitivity of one step RT-qPCR for targeted arboviruses in large mosquito pools, using pools of non-infected mosquitoes of various sizes (165, 320 and 1600 mosquitoes) containing one infected mosquito body with defined virus titers of chikungunya virus (CHIKV), usutu virus (USUV), West Nile (WNV) virus and Zika virus (ZIKV).ResultsCHIK, USUV, ZIKV, and WNV virus were detected in all tested pools using the RT-qPCR assay. Moreover, in the largest mosquito pools (1600 mosquitoes), RT-qPCR was able to detect the targeted viruses using different total RNA quantities (10, 1, 0.1 ng per reaction) as a template. Correlating the virus titer with the total RNA quantity allowed predicting the maximum number of mosquitoes per pool in which the RT-qPCR can theoretically detect the virus infection. The corresponding equation uses a Ct value of 36 as a cut-off value for virus detection and a virus copy number of 108 for the positive mosquito body. Based on this formula, the detection limits of CHIK, USUV, ZIKV and WNV were 5.08 x 105, 8.74 x 106, 2.33 x 107, and 5.24 x 105, respectively.ConclusionMosquito borne viruses can be reliably detected by RT-qPCR assay in pools of mosquitoes exceeding 1000 specimens. This will represent an important step to expand pathogen-free colonies for mass-rearing sterile males for programmes that have an SIT component.