Genetic diversity, phylogeography and molecular clock of the Lutzomyia longipalpis complex (Diptera: Psychodidae)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: The Lutzomyia longipalpis complex has a wide but discontinuous distribution in Latin America, extending throughout the Neotropical realm between Mexico and northern Argentina and Uruguay. In the Americas, this sandfly is the main vector of Leishmania infantum, the parasite responsible for Visceral Leishmaniasis (VL). The Lu. longipalpis complex consists of at least four sibling species, however, there is no current consensus on the number of haplogroups, or on their divergence. Particularly in Argentina, there have been few genetic analyses of Lu. longipalpis, despite its southern expansion and recent colonization of urban environments. The aim of this study was to analyze the genetic diversity and structure of Lu. longipalpis from Argentina, and to integrate these data to re-evaluate the phylogeography of the Lu. longipalpis complex using mitochondrial markers at a Latin American scale. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: Genetic diversity was estimated from six sites in Argentina, using a fragment of the ND4 and the 3´ extreme of the cyt b genes. Greatest genetic diversity was found in Tartagal, Santo Tomé and San Ignacio. There was high genetic differentiation of Lu. longipalpis in Argentina using both markers: ND4 (FST = 0.452, p < 0.0001), cyt b (FST = 0.201, p < 0.0001). Genetic and spatial Geneland analyses reveal the existence of two primary genetic clusters in Argentina, cluster 1: Tartagal, Santo Tomé, and San Ignacio; cluster 2: Puerto Iguazú, Clorinda, and Corrientes city. Phylogeographic analyses using ND4 and cyt b gene sequences available in GenBank from diverse geographic sites suggest greater divergence than previously reported. At least eight haplogroups (three of these identified in Argentina), each separated by multiple mutational steps using the ND4, are differentiated across the Neotropical realm. The divergence of the Lu. longipalpis complex from its most recent common ancestor (MRCA) was estimated to have occurred 0.70 MYA (95% HPD interval = 0.48-0.99 MYA). CONCLUSIONS/SIGNIFICANCE: This study provides new evidence supporting two Lu. longipalpis genetic clusters and three of the total eight haplogroups circulating in Argentina. There was a high level of phylogeographic divergence among the eight haplogroups of the Lu. longipalpis complex across the Neotropical realm. These findings suggest the need to analyze vector competence, among other parameters intrinsic to a zoonosis, according to vector haplogroup, and to consider these in the design and surveillance of vector and transmission control strategies.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".