Abstract
BackgroundThe horn fly (Haematobia irritans) is an obligate blood feeder that causes considerable economic losses in livestock industries worldwide. The control of this cattle pest is mainly based on insecticides; unfortunately, in many regions, horn flies have developed resistance. Vaccines or biological control have been proposed as alternative control methods, but the available information about the biology or physiology of this parasite is rather scarce.ResultsWe present a comprehensive description of the salivary and midgut transcriptomes of the horn fly (Haematobia irritans), using deep sequencing achieved by the Illumina protocol, as well as exploring the virome of this fly. Comparison of the two transcriptomes allow for identification of uniquely salivary or uniquely midgut transcripts, as identified by statistically differential transcript expression at a level of 16 x or more. In addition, we provide genomic highlights and phylogenetic insights of Haematobia irritans Nora virus and present evidence of a novel densovirus, both associated to midgut libraries of H. irritans.ConclusionsWe provide a catalog of protein sequences associated with the salivary glands and midgut of the horn fly that will be useful for vaccine design. Additionally, we discover two midgut-associated viruses that infect these flies in nature. Future studies should address the prevalence, biological effects and life cycles of these viruses, which could eventually lead to translational work oriented to the control of this economically important cattle pest.
Highlights
The horn fly (Haematobia irritans) is an obligate blood feeder that causes considerable economic losses in livestock industries worldwide
In the present work we focused on a comprehensive description of the salivary and midgut transcriptomes of the horn fly, using deep sequencing achieved by the Illumina protocol, as well as exploring the virome of this fly
Following assembly of these reads and extraction of 7,154 coding sequences, we selected 4,715 that were near full length and submitted their nucleotide mRNA and protein sequences to GenBank, which represents ~95% of the 4,977 protein sequences currently available for H. irritans
Summary
The horn fly (Haematobia irritans) is an obligate blood feeder that causes considerable economic losses in livestock industries worldwide. The control of this cattle pest is mainly based on insecticides; in many regions, horn flies have developed resistance. Haematobia irritans is a parasitic blood-feeding fly that spends most of its adult life in close contact with cattle, where they take small but frequent blood meals [1]. They stay mainly on the withers, back and side of the cattle, and at the belly during the hottest parts of the day. With the advent of inexpensive DNA sequence methods, the discovery of novel RNA viruses in vertebrate and invertebrate transcriptomes have led to an explosion in the discovery of new viruses [29]
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