P.P. Mendonca

Triatomines are hematophagous insects of great concern in public health because they are vectors of Trypanosoma cruzi, a protozoan that causes Chagas disease. Triatomines are also of great genetic interest, because they possess holocentric chromosomes and undergo an unusual form of meiosis with post-reductional segregation of sex chromosomes. Recent studies based on molecular markers have aimed to understand the evolutionary history of triatomines. Ribosomal DNA (rDNA) analyses are frequently used to elucidate the evolution of a given species, which can help to infer evolutionary relationships between species. Individual copies of rDNA do not accumulate mutations independently because they belong to multigene families, resulting in slight intraspecific and important interspecific variation. Read more. . .