Meta-taxonomic analysis of Cimex lectularius
Bed bugs collected from the same apartment units were pooled together for DNA extraction and molecular analysis. Total DNA was isolated from pools of bed bugs using the Qiagen DNeasy Blood & Tissue kit (Qiagen, Hilden, Germany) according to the manufacturers protocol and the concentration of double stranded DNA was checked on a Qubit fluorometer (ThermoFisher, Waltham, MA). Conventional polymerase chain reaction (PCR) was then carried out to detect the presence of mouse DNA in bed bug pools using published mouse-specific primers that target the -globin gene and produce an amplicon of ~1000 bp (Steub et al. 2008). 50 ng of total DNA were used per reaction and genomic DNA from wild-type C57BL/6 mice served as a positive control for these primers. In addition, to confirm that DNA was of suitable quality for PCR, control reactions were run for each sample using primers that target the RPL18 gene of C. lectularius and produce a 137 bp amplicon (Fisher et al. 2018).
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