Software

Afit: a bioinformatic tool for measuring aphid fitness and invasiveness

The Python bioinformatic tool Afit was developed to easily calculate and compare aphid fitness and invasiveness. The tool gathers information about the user (name, username, password, name of the institution, email address and notes about the aim of the project), the samples (species, ecotype/subspecies, asexual lineage ID, morph and colour type, host plant, presence of winged morphs, life cycle, insecticide resistance, karyological profile), the sampling locality (State, Province, GPS N-E coordinates) and date and the rearing conditions (host plant, temperature °C and photoperiod as daylight length in hours) (fig. 1). Daily fecundity and crowding data (life tables and population size of each replica) must be recorded on an Excel spreadsheet following the template available in the Afit zip file.

The tool generates daily fecundity and population growth curve of the asexual lineage starting from life table data. It calculates clonal fitness indices as a mean of the replicate indices and the SE. Moreover, the tool uses the population size data (obtained starting from any aphid number and measuring at any day) to generate a population growth curve corrected by crowding effect and an advanced intrinsic rate of increase rc, corrected by crowding, representative of the crowding sensibility of the asexual lineage

Download: Afitool.zip

Citation: Nardelli A, Peona V, Toschi A, Mandrioli M, Manicardi GC. Afit: a bioinformatic tool for measuring aphid fitness and invasiveness. Bull. Entomol. Res. 2017, 107:458-465. doi: 10.1017/S0007485316001061.

[Ultimo aggiornamento: 12/06/2018 20:30:40]