Abstract
BackgroundTicks--vectors of medical and veterinary importance--are themselves also significant pests. Tick salivary proteins are the result of adaptation to blood feeding and contain inhibitors of blood clotting, platelet aggregation, and angiogenesis, as well as vasodilators and immunomodulators. A previous analysis of the sialotranscriptome (from the Greek sialo, saliva) of Amblyomma variegatum is revisited in light of recent advances in tick sialomes and provides a database to perform a proteomic study.ResultsThe clusterized data set has been expertly curated in light of recent reviews on tick salivary proteins, identifying many new families of tick-exclusive proteins. A proteome study using salivary gland homogenates identified 19 putative secreted proteins within a total of 211 matches.ConclusionsThe annotated sialome of A. variegatum allows its comparison to other tick sialomes, helping to consolidate an emerging pattern in the salivary composition of metastriate ticks; novel protein families were also identified. Because most of these proteins have no known function, the task of functional analysis of these proteins and the discovery of novel pharmacologically active compounds becomes possible.
Highlights
Ticks–vectors of medical and veterinary importance–are themselves significant pests
Based on various BLAST sequence comparisons to several databases, these unigenes were functionally characterized into the following groups: Putative secreted (S), putative housekeeping (H), transposable element-derived (TE), and of unknown class (U), because they could not be classified (Table 1)
Thirty-two percent of expressed tag sequence (EST) belonged to the S class, smaller than other sialomes of insects and prostriate ticks but similar to metastriate sialomes of Rhipicephalus sanguineus, which had only 26% of its salivary ESTs attributed to the S class [18]
Summary
Ticks–vectors of medical and veterinary importance–are themselves significant pests. Transcriptome analysis of Amblyomma americanum and Dermacentor variabilis [14] as well as of the prostriate tick Ixodes scapularis [15] were performed These three papers represent a landmark in tick biology by providing insights into their salivary composition. We re-analyzed data from Nene et al [15], available at DBEST http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nucest of the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), producing an annotated and hyperlinked spreadsheet containing new information related to unique tick proteins unavailable in 2002. This database was used in conjunction with proteomic analysis to identify expressed peptides. Nucleotide sequence data reported are available in the Third Party Annotation Section of the DDBJ/EMBL/ GenBank databases under the accession numbers TPA: BK007105-BK007849
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