Abstract
Ticks secrete proteins in their saliva that change over the course of feeding to modulate the host inflammation, immune responses, haemostasis or may cause paralysis. RNA next generation sequencing technologies can reveal the complex dynamics of tick salivary glands as generated from various tick life stages and/or males and females. The current study represents 15,115 Illumina sequenced contigs of the salivary gland transcriptome from male and female Rhipicephalus evertsi evertsi ticks of early, mid and late feeding stages from 1320 separate assemblies using three short read assemblers. The housekeeping functional class contributed to the majority of the composition of the transcriptome (80%) but with lower expression (51%), while the secretory protein functional class represented only 14% of the transcriptome but 46% of the total coverage. Six percent had an unknown status contributing 3% of the overall expression in the salivary glands. Platelet aggregation inhibitors, blood clotting inhibitors and immune-modulators orthologous to the ancestral tick lineages were confirmed in the transcriptome and their differential expression during feeding in both genders observed. This transcriptome contributes data of importance to salivary gland biology and blood feeding physiology of non-model organisms.
Highlights
Ticks secrete proteins in their saliva that change over the course of feeding to modulate the host inflammation, immune responses, haemostasis or may cause paralysis
Transcriptomics enabled by RNA generation sequencing technologies (RNA-Seq) has revealed the complex dynamics of the salivary glands of ticks as evident in the growing list of published tick salivary gland transcriptomes generated from various tick life stages and/or genders[4]
The advances in generation sequencing form the baseline towards functional genomic research especially in the case of a non-model organism, like R. evertsi evertsi, where genetic information is limited with no reference genome or proteome to annotate putative identified genes with little or no homology to other model-organisms
Summary
Ticks secrete proteins in their saliva that change over the course of feeding to modulate the host inflammation, immune responses, haemostasis or may cause paralysis. Blood clotting inhibitors and immune-modulators orthologous to the ancestral tick lineages were confirmed in the transcriptome and their differential expression during feeding in both genders observed This transcriptome contributes data of importance to salivary gland biology and blood feeding physiology of non-model organisms. Transcriptomics enabled by RNA generation sequencing technologies (RNA-Seq) has revealed the complex dynamics of the salivary glands of ticks as evident in the growing list of published tick salivary gland transcriptomes generated from various tick life stages and/or genders[4] These studies identified thousands of transcripts coding for numerous protein families secreted over the course of feeding with defined differential expression patterns between male and female ticks. The catalog may be used in future as resource for identification of functional proteins
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