Discussion
Insect breeding facilities when catering to industrial level needs have to be able to meet routine demands for both, high quality and high number of robust insects whilst optimizing resources in terms of man power and time involved
. In GlaxoSmithKline at Tres Cantos Medicines Development Campus (Madrid, Spain) an insectary facility has been established since 2012 as a part of a research platform dedicated to the development of new anti-malarial molecules with transmission blocking potential.
Anopheles stephensi is reared from eggs to robust adults using a protocol that has been optimized to produce more than two thousand high quality robust females per week thereby successfully meeting the demands for mosquitoes used regularly in the Standard Membrane Feeding Assay (SMFA). It is therefore important to quickly estimate the number of pupae required in-order to provide for the corresponding number of adult mosquitoes.
There are several methods which have proved to be efficient and rapid for pupae collection from the rearing pans (Methods in Anopheles research (MR4), 2014). But when numbers matter, pupae have to be counted manually becoming a tedious, labor intensive and time consuming task. In this study we describe a new technique to quickly estimate the number of mosquito pupae collected using ImageJ software (imagej.nih.gov/ij/). Pupae were placed in a pan and th
