Genetic polymorphism of cytochrome oxidase subunit 1 (CO1) gene of aedes albopictus isolated from Royal Belum, Perak / Fatin Hannani Mohd Yusoff

Aedes mosquitoes had contributed to the dengue fever all around the globe. But in Malaysia, there are two species of the aedes mosquitoes that dominated in transmitted the dengue fever namely Ae. albopictus and Ae. aegypti which are the major vector of dengue fever whether in urban or rural area. Dengue cases are difficult to diminish as the vaccine for dengue fever and dengue haemorrhagic fever are still in unavailable for practical use. Hence, determination of the population genetics structure of vector is important to understanding about vector distribution in help for control dengue programme. Studies examining the population genetics structure of Ae. albopictus from different environmental area based on mitochondrial DNA CO1gene has not been clarified from other researcher. Therefore, this study was conducted to evaluate the genetic polymorphism among Ae. albopictus from Royal Belum, Perak, as a representative for population from forested. The genomic DNA of three individual adult female Ae. albopictus mosquitoes and three USM laboratory strains (USM LS) were extracted and amplified with three different set of primers CO1 marker. The PCR product then been concatenated for obtaining the longest single fragment of CO1 genes. BLAST analysis showed high similarities with reference sequences from NCBI GenBank. Consequently, all concatenated sequences were aligned using ClustalX2.1. Genetic diversity and haplotypes generated were analyzed using DnaSP. Haplotype network was constructed in PopART software according to TCS network. Our findings revealed that Ae. albopictus population from urban areas has higher genetic variation than forested and urban areas, with Hd values is 1.000. Furthermore, haplotype network of urban areas (H10-H13) shows the highest number of hatch mark’s line. The data obtained from this study can be used to plan and introduce more reliable and effective methods in controlling the expanding of the Aedes mosquito population especially Ae. albopictus.