Identification of blood meals in Aedes aegypti by antibody sandwich enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay
Chow, E.; Wirtz, R.A.; Scott, T.W.
Journal of the American Mosquito Control Association 9(2): 196-205
1993
ISSN/ISBN: 8756-971X PMID: 8350077 Document Number: 413990
A comparative study of 3 ELISA protocols was performed for host blood meal identification in Aedes aegypti. In the sandwich-B ELISA, which used a combination of heavy and heavy + light chain conjugates, specificity was improved to such a degree that conjugates no longer required cross-adsorption with heterologous sera. Using the sandwich-B assay, human blood meals in laboratory reared Ae. aegypti could be detected longer after feeding (100% at 32 h and 80% at 42 h) than with a direct assay (100% at 20 h). Efficacy of the sandwich-B and direct ELISAs in field analyses was studied in parallel using 80 field collected mosquitoes from Thailand. The sandwich-B assay was superior (88% detection rate) to the direct assay (41% detection rate) and was thus-selected as the method of choice for future field studies.