Fig 1.
Geographic distribution of Amblyomma variegatum samples used in the present study.
Samples were collected from nine locations in Malawi and seven districts in Uganda. The base layer of the map was made with Natural Earth (naturalearthdata.com) using the following links: https://www.naturalearthdata.com/downloads/10m-cultural-vectors/10m-admin-0-countries/; https://www.naturalearthdata.com/downloads/10m-physical-vectors/10m-lakes/; https://www.naturalearthdata.com/downloads/10m-natural-earth-1/natural-earth-1-with-shaded-relief/.
Table 1.
Primers and probe used for amplification and sequencing of Amblyomma variegatum mitogenome and multi-locus sequence typing of Rickettsia africae.
Table 2.
Comparison of mitochondrial gene variations from 41 Amblyomma variegatum ticks.
Fig 2.
Mismatch distribution pattern for Amblyomma variegatum from Malawi and Uganda based on the 15 concatenated mitochondrial gene sequences.
Mismatch distribution pattern for A. variegatum sequences from (A) Malawi and Uganda, (B) Malawi, and (C) Uganda. The x-axis shows the number of pairwise differences (genetic distance) between pairs of sequences and the y-axis shows their frequency. Solid histograms illustrate the observed frequencies. The solid black line indicates the simulated mismatch distributions expected under demographic expansion and the dotted black line indicates those expected under spatial expansion.
Table 3.
Analysis of Molecular Variance (AMOVA) for Amblyomma variegatum from Malawi and Uganda.
Table 4.
Neutrality test values of Amblyomma variegatum from Malawi and Uganda based on complete mitogenomes.
Table 5.
Analysis of Molecular Variance (AMOVA) for Rickettsia africae from Malawi and Uganda.
Table 6.
Neutrality test values of Rickettsia africae from Malawi and Uganda based on the concatenated six gene sequences.
Fig 3.
Tanglegram of the phylogeny of Amblyomma variegatum (left) and Rickettsia africae (right).
Fig 4.
Procrustean superimposition plot of vector-pathogen associations based on their principal coordinate axes.
Vector (Amblyomma variegatum) coordinates are shown as solid circles, and pathogen (Rickettsia africae) coordinates are shown as hollow circles, with arrows pointing from each pathogen to its corresponding vector. Samples from Malawi are shown in blue and samples from Uganda are shown in red. The X-axis and Y-axis represent the first two principal coordinate axes derived from the phylogenetic distance matrices, capturing the primary patterns of variation in vector and pathogen relationships. Arrows indicate the strength of vector-pathogen co-structure, with shorter arrows indicating closer congruence between vector and pathogen datasets. The m² value was 0.216, but the p-value was 0.064, indicating a nonsignificant association between vector and pathogen.