Fig. 7

Rescue experiment of albumin digestion in wCle-free bed bugs treated with B-vitamins. wCle-free bed bugs were assayed 4-d and 8-d post-feeding. Aliquots of the same midgut samples from hemoglobin assays (Fig. 6) were used for albumin assays. Within each treatment group, each albumin measurement at 4-d and 8-d was normalized to mean albumin content of the respective treatment group immediately after feeding (0-d post-feeding). There was a significant difference between treatments at both time points post-feeding (n = 10 per treatment, one-way ANOVA, d 4: F = 10.71, df = 4,45, P < 0.0001; d 8: F = 10.041, df = 4,45, P < 0.0001). Treatments within each time point that do not share lowercase letters are significantly different from each other (Tukey’s HSD test, P < 0.05). The full vitamin mix contained B2, B7, B1, B6, and B9. There was a significant recovery of albumin digestion with riboflavin treatment at 8-d post-feeding compared to the no-vitamin controls. For reference to wCle-present bed bugs, the two horizontal red lines represent the average proportion of the initial albumin content for wCle-present bed bugs from 4-d and 8-d respectively in the experiment shown in Fig. 5B. Means ± SEM are shown.