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This project seeks to isolate, identify and describe both known and novel microbiota (bacteria, viruses, etc.) associated with New Jersey's mosquitoes as part of an NIH-funded research project.
Effective surveillance of mosquitoes and pathogens is critical to monitor current disease outbreaks and detect the potential for future outbreaks before they occur. Early detection ensures that vector control efforts are directed to the right location at the right time to avert an epidemic. Surveillance and detection of infected mosquitoes is often an early predictor of impending human infection but comes with its own challenges including the time involved to sort and identify large numbers of mosquitoes while maintaining a cold chain to prevent RNA degradation. Given these limitations, novel strategies employing CO2-baited mosquito traps that house sugar-soaked nucleic acid preservation cards to capture viral RNA for remote arbovirus surveillance are being piloted. As infected mosquitoes probe the sugar on the cards, they expectorate DNA and viral RNA that is immediately deactivated by the proprietary FTA reagent.
Here we propose to combine the utility of honey-baited FTA card sample collection with a powerful next-generation shotgun sequencing approach in a pilot field study that illustrates the wealth of information that can be gleaned about the arboviral landscape from metagenomic analyses of nucleic acids deposited on sentinel FTA cards.
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