Project description:Malaria is as one of the most debilitating mosquito-borne global health burdens. While much of the malaria and mosquito-borne disease attention have focused on Africa, South East Asia accounts for a sizable portion of the malaria global burden. Moreover, about 50% of the Asian malaria incidence and deaths have been from India. The completion of genome sequence of Anopheles stephensi, a major malaria vector in Asia, offers new opportunities for global health innovation, not to mention for progress in deciphering the vectorial ability of this mosquito species at a molecular level. Moving forward, tissue-based expression profiling would be the next obvious step in understanding gene functions of Anopheles stephensi. We report here the first study, to the best of our knowledge, on transcriptomic profile of four important organs of an adult female Anopheles stephensi mosquito (midgut, Malpighian tubules, fat body and ovary). In all, we identified over 21,000 transcripts corresponding to more than 12,000 gene loci from these four tissues. This study provides the tissue-based expression profiles of majority of annotated transcripts in Anopheles stephensi genome, and the dynamics of alternative splicing in these tissues. Understanding the transcript expression and gene function at the tissue level would immensely help in enhancing our knowledge of this important vector and decipher the putative role of these tissues. This knowledge might in turn provide the basis of selection of candidates for future studies on vectorial ability and novel molecular targets to intercept malaria transmission.
Project description:A piggyBac transposon-based gene trap element was transformed into the Asian malaria vector, Anopheles stephensi, and remobilized using the jumpstarter approach using genetic crosses. Individuals that displayed a gene trap remobilization event were then photodocumented and their RNA and DNA complements were extracted. The DNA compelement was used to determine the genomic insertion site, while the RNA was used to determine the transcript coverage of the genes into which the transposons inserted. In nearly half of the cases, insertion was identified to fall within introns present in the 5'-UTR of transcripts- which are not indicated in the current ab initio models for Anopheles stephensi. The ability to utilize next generation RNA-Seq elucidated the functionality of the gene trap elements that inserted outside of the ab initio gene models, providing clear evidence that not only was the gene trap element working properly, but that it also had a bias towards 5'-end insertion, in particular, 5'-UTR intronic insertion.
Project description:A piggyBac transposon-based gene trap element was transformed into the Asian malaria vector, Anopheles stephensi, and remobilized using the jumpstarter approach using genetic crosses. Individuals that displayed a gene trap remobilization event were then photodocumented and their RNA and DNA complements were extracted. The DNA compelement was used to determine the genomic insertion site, while the RNA was used to determine the transcript coverage of the genes into which the transposons inserted. In nearly half of the cases, insertion was identified to fall within introns present in the 5'-UTR of transcripts- which are not indicated in the current ab initio models for Anopheles stephensi. The ability to utilize next generation RNA-Seq elucidated the functionality of the gene trap elements that inserted outside of the ab initio gene models, providing clear evidence that not only was the gene trap element working properly, but that it also had a bias towards 5'-end insertion, in particular, 5'-UTR intronic insertion. RNA from 200 pooled individually-extracted An. stephensi that demonstrated a gene trap remobilizable event.
Project description:Salivary gland proteins of Anopheles mosquitoes offer attractive targets to understand interactions with sporozoites, blood feeding behavior, homeostasis and immunological evaluation of malaria vectors and parasite interactions. To date limited studies have been carried out to elucidate salivary proteins of An. stephensi salivary glands. The aim of the present study was to provide detailed analytical attributives of functional salivary gland proteins of urban malaria vector An. stephensi. A proteomic approach combining one-dimensional electrophoresis (1DE), ion trap liquid chromatography mass spectrometry (LC/MS/MS) and computational bioinformatic analysis was adopted to provide the first direct insight into identification and functional characterization of known salivary proteins and novel salivary proteins of An. stephensi. Computational studies by online servers namely, Mascot and OMSSA algorithms identified a total of 36 known salivary proteins and 123 novel proteins analysed by LC/MS/MS. This first report describes a baseline proteomic catalogue of 159 salivary proteins belonging to various categories of signal transduction, regulation of blood coagulation cascade, and various immune and energy pathways of An. stephensi sialo-transcriptome by mass spectrometry. Our results may serve as basis to provide a putative functional role of proteins into concept of blood feeding, biting behavior and other aspects of vector-parasite host interactions for parasite development in anopheline mosquitoes.
Project description:Mayaro virus (MAYV) is a mosquito-borne Alphavirus responsible for outbreaks in South America and the Caribbean. In this study we infected Anopheles stephensi with MAYV and sequenced mRNA and small RNA to understand how MAYV infection impacts gene transcription and the expression of small RNAs in the mosquito vector. Genes involved with innate immunity and autophagy are regulated in response to MAYV infection of An. stephensi, we also discover novel miRNAs and describe their expression patterns following bloodmeal ingestion. These results suggest that MAYV does induce a molecular response to infection in its mosquito vector species and that MAYV may have mechanisms to evade the vector immune response.