I get between 1-2 ug of DNA from a single mosquito depending on preservation condition (more from freeze killed, less from dry mosquitoes) and extraction method. Obviously the final concentration will depend on your resuspension volume. I usually work with 6-10 ng/ul.

Depending on your extraction method, the amount of DNA and its quality will vary. For QIAGEN extraction, we get lower DNA concentration while for Phenol-Chloroform, we get higher DNA concentration. However when we check it with Flourometer, the quality of the DNA concentration from Phenol-Chloroform method was very moderately low. Typically I have to get >10 ng/ul to use for succeeding experiments. As Dina said, this final concentration will depend on the resuspension volume. 

Thank you so much Dr Thaddeus and Dr Dina. Similarly, I can usually extract 1-2 ug of DNA from the frozen mosquitoes, preserved on silica. I have also reached a greater amount of DNA (±3ug) in the extraction of fresh mosquitoes, recently collected, using Qiagen extraction kit. In order to get a good PCR yield, I use a total-DNA concentration between 5-10 ng/ul. However, I have not found in the literature the expected amount of DNA considering the body mass of a mosquito. That is, a standard or the maximum that can be achieved. 

Hi Shirley. Yes you are correct on your last two sentences. I think the DNA concentration you have is fine. It really depends on its quality once you check in your Gel then afterwards to your PCR. If I know my DNA concentration is really low and I wanted to detect a certain gene marker for this individual mosquito, I place DMSO in the PCR master mix to enhance the binding of the primers and also lower the annealing temperature. 

Sirlei, it is possible that a dry mosquito, if dried quickly and kept dry, may weight less but yield more usable DNA than a heavier mosquito kept in ethanol, for example. I am not sure DNA/weight is the right metric unless all conditions are kept the same. Is there a particular reason you were looking for a standard? Regarding a maximum, I would think it also very much depends on the species and time of the year - a big Aedes japonicus female easily provides 3 ug of DNA if carefully preserved, while from a tiny summer Aedes albopictus we are lucky to get 1 ug even if killing and preservation strategies are the same. Of course weight here would serve as a proxy for expectation of DNA yield.

This is a very interesting and important problem!  I like the excellent and thoughtful answers! 

Thank you for the excellent information. This will be very useful for the progress of the study. The reason for what I need to know the total amount of DNA present in a mosquito, think to I try to optimizing my protocols for extracting the DNA from one mosquito's leg preserved in the museum. Rare samples, dried on mothballs, imbibed on alcohol, and frozen then dried on silica gel. The legs of rare mosquitoes recently collected in the field as well. This allows the conservation of the rest of mosquito body for future phenotypic variation studies. The variation of the amount of DNA extracted in each of these mosquitoes is something strange!