FIG 1.

Microsporidia MB infection prevalence and intensity in adult An. arabiensis tissues. Prevalence rates and relative intensities of Microsporidia MB were measured for the guts (GT), fat bodies (FB), gonads (GD), and carcasses (CAR) of 7-day-old mosquitoes using qPCR. (A) The gonads were the tissues with the highest prevalence of Microsporidia MB in the dissected tissues, indicating that the gonads are the main site of infection. (B and C) Relative quantification of Microsporidia MB intensity in the tissues that turned out positive showed high infection intensities in the gonadal tissues in both females and males. The variations in the intensity of Microsporidia MB between the tissues were determined using the Kruskal-Wallis H test. A significant variation in the intensity was observed in both female tissues [H(3, n = 56) = 37.50, P < 0.0001] and male tissues [H(3, n = 79) = 36.70, P < 0.0001]. Post-hoc pairwise comparisons indicating the significance between the different groups were conducted and further affirmed gonads as the main sites of infection. Asterisks show the level of significance (*P  <  0.05, ***P  <  0.001, and ****P  <  0.0001), while ns indicates no significance. The bars in the plots indicate the median for each tissue group. The number of independent replicates is 7.