Using SDS-PAGE gel fingerprinting to identify soft-bodied wood-boring insect larvae to species.

Background: This paper describes the progress that we have made in assessing the feasibility of 'fingerprinting' using imaged SDS-PAGE gels of haemolymph proteins, to identify soft-bodied wood-boring insect larvae such as the Asian longhorn beetle, Anoplophora glabripennis (Motscholsky, 1853) (Coleoptera: Cerambycidae). Because of stringent import restrictions and difficulty in obtaining licences to work with these organisms, we opted to work with four species of scarab beetle, Mecynorhina polyphemus (Fabricius, 1781), Pachnoda sinuata (Fabricius, 1775), Eucidella shiratica (Csiki, 1909) and Eucidella shultzeorum (Kolbe, 1906) which have near identical larval morphologies.

Results: We show that this technology when combined with an advanced pattern matching system (Digital Automated Identification SYstem - DAISY) can classify soft-bodied insect larvae that are almost identical morphologically to species at a level of accuracy is in excess of 98%. The study also indicates that the technology copes well with noisy data and small training sets.

Conclusion: The experience gained in undertaking this study gives us confidence that we will be able to develop a field deployable system in the medium term. We believe that as a high-throughput identification tool, this technology is superior to competitor technologies (e.g. fingerprinting of imaged DNA gels) in terms of speed, cost and ease of use; and therefore, is suitable for low-cost deployment in the field. © 2017 Society of Chemical Industry.