Abstract: Identifying animal species used as mosquito bloodmeal hosts can inform decisions on targeted locations for vector control. Traditional approaches use regular PCR followed by Sanger sequencing to generate data, which are then compared with curated sequence data in GenBank. We present an updated workflow for mosquito bloodmeal identification that uses the MinION sequencing platform by Oxford Nanopore Technologies (ONT). The MinION sequencer is a palm-sized sequencer powered by the user’s laptop computer; a feature that potentially moves the generation of data closer to practitioners of vector control. The updated protocol makes use of sample multiplexing to provide faster turnaround of data comparable to the quality and accuracy of previous methods.
