Adaptive sampling as a new tool for pathogen surveillance and mitogenome assembly in blood-feeding arthropod vectors
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- Diseases spread by arthropod vectors (e.g., ticks, mosquitoes) are major global health threats and have been increasing considerably over recent decades
- New molecular tools for genomic vector-borne pathogen surveillance and for characterizing a variety of arthropod vector taxa are urgently needed
- Nanopore sequencing supplemented with adaptive sampling represents an innovative strategy through which researchers may enrich or deplete their sequencing output in real-time based on near-instantaneous mapping of individual reads against a user-specified reference as sequencing is occurring
- This approach has many exciting potential applications in vector-borne disease surveillance, pathogen discovery, and can be simultaneously leveraged for molecular identification of cryptic arthropods and their blood-meals through analysis of mitochondrial species barcoding genes