Microbiologist Centers for Disease Control, Colorado, United States
Agencies tasked with performing mosquito-based arbovirus surveillance are often inundated with large numbers of mosquitoes during peak season, which taxes their labor, time, and resources. Superpooling is a technique whereby multiple individual aliquots of mosquito homogenate or extracted RNA are combined into one pool for virus screening and can be a viable option to reduce the testing burden for these agencies. Alternatively, superpooling can be employed in the early season to reduce testing efforts for likely negative mosquitoes when infection rates are low. This presentation will describe and compare methods for superpooling and showcase results of the practice using real surveillance data collected over a season from a location with high West Nile virus incidence.
