The Purpose of This Site

This web site is presented for the benefit of the Anopheles gambiae research community. It is intended to serve as a convenient central reference for images labeled to represent our working interpretation of the unpublished drawn map of Colluzi et al. If you find discrepancies, or have suggestions for improvement, please contact the archivist Mark Q. Benedict.

How the Images are Presented

All links to polytene chromosomes division images are shown in the left-hand frame. Each line lists divisions shown in a particular image, and complete divisions are hyperlinked to the appropriate image. Partial subdivisions, both boundaries of which are not labeled, may be shown but not listed. The images are arranged by ascending division left to right, and some overlap is intentional.

Acknowledgements

These images are from the laboratory of Frank H. Collins and were collected during 1996-97 by Anthony J. Cornel at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, GA. The images were edited and HTML files written by Mark Q. Benedict. We thank Odette Mukabayire, Mario Coluzzi, and Vincenzo Petrarca (!!!and others????) for careful examination and comments on these images. We also appreciate the photographic map made by Vasantha Kumar that we considered in our interpretation of the Coluzzi et al. map. (I'll add a link to Kitsos photo of her map here.)

Technical Aspects

Chromosomes were prepared from half-gravid ovaries of Anopheles gambiae s.s. mosquitoes by the method of Green and Hunt, 1980 (Interpretations of variation in ovarian polytene chromosomes of Anopheles funestus Giles, An. parensis Gillies, and An. aruni. Genetica 51:187-195). Chromosome images were collected from several spreads and individuals, though one spread was often used to produce images of several divisions. Strains used were PEST (pink-eye standard) and RSP (reduced susceptibility to permethrin). NOTE: Images for divisions 23 and 27 were captured from spreads homozygous for the 2La inversion.

All images were obtained on an Olympus BX60 microscope using a Plan Apochromatic 100 X objective and a Sony Catseye DKC-5000 CCD (charge coupled device) camera. The original tiff images were collected in Adobe Photoshop as 3.4 megabyte TIFF color files. The images were rotated, cropped, white-spaces filled, and contrast, brightness, and hue adjusted in Adobe Photoshop. The image sizes were then proportionally reduced 50%, marked, and saved as both a Photoshop (PSD) file, and as the compression-level 4 JPEG file of approximately 20 kb that are viewed here. All divisions are shown at the same magnification. HTML files were written by hand or using the Netscape Gold 3.0 editor.

Image Files in Other Formats and Site Download

We suggest downloading the entire site by FTP for rapid local access. The files are available as Macintosh and zip compressed archives. For researchers who are unable to do this, we will provide the site files by mail on a 3-1/2" diskette (specify PC or Mac Format). Please indicate your affiliation and the intended use. For researchers who can justify requests for images in other graphic formats, please make your requests to the archivist, and we will try to accomodate special needs.