Molecular Identification of Dromedary Tick

PCR amplification of ITS2 of the rRNA gene and two mitochondrial genes, COI and 16S rRNA, was performed, using both specifically designed primers and previously published primers (Table-1) [18 (link)-20 (link)]. H. dromedarii DNA (2 μl) and 0.3 μl of each primer (10 pmol) (Macrogen, Seoul, South Korea) were added to the PCR mixture, containing one unit of Max Taq DNA Polymerase (Vivantis Technologies, Malaysia), 5 μl 10× ViBuffer (Vivantis Technologies, Malaysia), and 2 μl dNTPs (10 mM). The volume was adjusted to 25 μl by adding distilled water. Thermal cycling was performed on a TPersonal Thermocycler (BIOMETRA, Germany) with an initial 15 min cycle at 95°C, followed by 35 cycles consisting of 30 s at 94°C, 1 min at 55°C or 60°C depending on the primers, and 1 min at 72°C, followed by a final 10 min extension step at 72°C. To rule out DNA or amplicon contamination, Molecular Grade Water was used as a negative control throughout each step of the protocol. The PCR amplicons were sequenced by Macrogen Inc. (Seoul, South Korea) using BigDye (Applied Biosystems, California, USA) on an ABI3730XL DNA sequencer (Applied Biosystems, California, USA).