Molecular Diet Analysis of Two African Free-Tailed Bats (Molossidae) Using High Throughput Sequencing

摘要: Given the diversity of prey consumed by insectivorous bats, it is difficult to discern composition their diet using morphological or conventional PCR-based analyses faeces. We demonstrate use a powerful alternate tool, Roche FLX sequencing platform deep-sequence uniquely 5′ tagged insect-generic barcode cytochrome c oxidase I (COI) fragments, that were PCR amplified from faecal pellets two free-tailed bat species Chaerephon pumilus and Mops condylurus (family: Molossidae). Although challenged paucity southern African insect COI sequences in GenBank BOLD databases, similarity existing collections allowed preliminary identification 25 families six orders insects within C. pumilus, 24 seven M. condylurus. Insects identified Lepidoptera Diptera widely present among samples analysed. The observed most frequently Noctuidae Nymphalidae (Lepidoptera). Species-level analysis data was accomplished novel bioinformatics techniques for molecular operational taxonomic units (MOTU). Based on these analyses, our provide little evidence resource partitioning between sympatric Simunye region Swaziland at time year when collected, although as more complete databases against which compare are generated this may have be re-evaluated.