Project description:Ticks are notorious carriers of pathogens; these blood-sucking arthropods can spread a variety of deadly diseases. The salivary gland is the main organ in ticks, and this organ begins to develop rapidly when Ixodidae ticks suck blood. When these ticks reach a critical weight, the salivary glands stop developing and begin to degenerate. Specific developmental features of the salivary glands are regulated by multiple factors, such as hormones, proteins and other small molecular substances. In this study, we used iTRAQ quantitative proteomics to study dynamic changes in salivary gland proteins in female Haemaphysalis longicornis at four feeding stages: unfed, partially fed, semi-engorged, and engorged. Through bioinformatics analysis of a large number of proteins, we found that molecular motor- and TCA cycle-related proteins play an important role during the development of the salivary glands. The results of RNAi experiments showed that when dynein, kinesin, isocitrate dehydrogenase, and citrate synthase were knocked down, ticks were unable to suck blood normally. The structure and function of the salivary glands were also significantly affected. In addition, four proteins from H. longicornis were found to have very low homology with those from mammals, including humans. Therefore, it is expected that drugs or antibodies targeting these unique sequences can be designed to kill ticks.
Project description:Background The generalist dipteran pupal parasitoid Nasonia vitripennis injects 79 venom peptides into the host before egg laying. This venom induces several important changes in the host, including developmental arrest, immunosuppression, and alterations to normal metabolism. It is hoped that diverse and potent bioactivities of N. vitripennis venom provide an opportunity for the design of novel acting drugs. However, currently very little is known about the individual functions of N. vitripennis venom peptides and less than half can be bioinformatically annotated. The paucity of annotation information complicates the design of studies that seek to better understand the potential mechanisms underlying the envenomation response. Although the RNA interference system of N. vitripennis provides an opportunity to functionally characterise venom encoding genes, with 79 candidates this represents a daunting task. For this reason we were interested in determining the expression levels of venom encoding genes in the venom gland, such that this information could be used to rank candidate venoms. To do this we carried out deep sequencing of the transcriptome of the venom gland and neighbouring ovary tissue and used RNA-seq to measure expression from the 79 venom encoding genes. The generation of a specific venom gland transcriptome dataset also provides further opportunities to investigate novel features of this highly specialised organ. Results High throughput sequencing and RNA-seq revealed that the highest expressed venom encoding gene in the venom gland was a serine protease called Nasvi2EG007167, which has previously been implicated in the apoptotic activity of N. vitripennis venom. As expected the RNA-seq confirmed that the N. vitripennis venom encoding genes are almost exclusively expressed in the venom gland relative to the neighbouring ovary tissue. Novel peptides appear to perform key roles in N. vitripennis venom function as only four of the highest 15 expressed venom encoding genes are bioinformatically annotationed. The high throughput sequencing data also provided evidence for the existence of an additional 471 novel genes in the Nasonia genome that are expressed in the venom gland and ovary. Finally, metagenomic analysis of venom gland transcripts identified viral transcripts that may play an important part in the N. vitripennis venom function. Conclusions The expression level information provided here for the 79 venom encoding genes provides an unbiased dataset that can be used by the N. vitripennis community to identify high value candidates for further functional characterisation. These candidates represent bioactive peptides that have value in drug development pipelines.