Assessing the population genetic structure and demographic history of Anopheles gambiae and An. arabiensis at island and mainland populations in Uganda: Implications for testing novel malaria vector control approaches
Assessing the population genetic structure and demographic history of Anopheles gambiae and An. arabiensis at island and mainland populations in Uganda: Implications for testing novel malaria vector control approaches
Tags: Africa, Anopheles, Genetic engineering, Malaria, Vector controlRita Mwima, Tin-Yu J. Hui, Edward Lukyamuzi, et al, bioRxiv, 2025.
This study collected 2918 Anopheles gambiae and 173 Anopheles. arabiensis across six populations from both the islands on Lake Victoria and mainland Uganda for amplicon sequencing. Large pairwise FST values were observed between the two species, indicating their divergence. We observed low but often significant FST values between the 6 An. gambiae populations, while between the An. arabiensis mainland populations, FST values were not significant. Principal Component Analysis also revealed strong genetic structure between the two species but did not provide a clear picture between populations within each species. We also found that mainland An. gambiae populations had higher within population genetic diversity than the islands’, while An. arabiensis had the lowest nucleotide diversity. Tajima’s D values were all negative, suggesting a recent population expansion. The islands An. gambiae populations had very low contemporary effective population sizes in the tens and hundreds, as estimated from linkage disequilibrium, while the mainland population sizes were consistently higher, in the thousands.
