Profile
Project Title: Metagenomics of carrion flies for assessing biodiversity and disease spillover risk in the catchment forests of Indonesia’s new capital city
Summary: Metagenomic analysis of biting invertebrates offers a powerful novel approach to record mammalian biodiversity in human-modified tropical forest landscapes. To date, most work has focused on identifying mammal DNA in leech blood-meals; however, leeches are absent from highly-degraded forests and plantations, and cannot be collected in traps, so limiting their potential for biodiversity surveys. For my PhD project I am using carrion flies as samplers of vertebrate biodiversity in Indonesian Borneo. Carrion flies occur across Southeast Asia, feed on live and dead animals, and are implicated in spreading diseases from wild animals to livestock. I am focusing on catchment forests near the new Indonesian capital city of Nusantara, which are threatened by imminent population expansion, and where baseline biodiversity data are needed for future monitoring. By sampling along a disturbance gradient from forest to populated areas, I am also trialing this method for assessing risks of insect-borne disease transmission, inferred by detecting DNA of wild animals and domestic livestock in the same flies. For my project I am using portable nanopore-based DNA sequencing devices, which can identify fly species and their mammal prey in the field, thus removing the need to transport genetic material.
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