Simulium damnosum s.l., the vector of West African onchocerciasis, has been the target of a major insect control initiative for the past 20 years. However, attempts to study the migration patterns of reinvading infective flies into controlled areas have been restricted by the lack of suitable genetic markers. Here, the results of the first population-level study of S. damnosum s.l. using a repetitive DNA marker, pSOll, are presented. Sequence analysis of pSOll revealed a complex internal pattern of repetition and an open reading frame with 56.8 per cent similarity to a mouse retrotransposon protein. Combined with an interspersed genomic distribution, the internal structure of pSOll suggested that it represents the 5' half of a transposable element. The genomic diversity of the sequence was analysed using Southern blot analysis of genomic DNA. Data were collected from 475 individuals from the island of Bioko (in Equatorial Guinea), Cameroon, Côte d'Ivoire and Sierra Leone. The results indicate that pSOll is useful as an indicator of genomic diversity and that the experimental design used here permits comparison of an approximately random sample of chromosomal loci. Making this assumption, estimates of homozygosity based on pSOll diversity were used to study interand intraspecific variability. The results indicate that pSOll is potentially useful for studying population-level processes in S. damnosum s.l.
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