Transcriptomic analysis of the tick midgut and salivary gland responses upon repeated blood-feeding on a vertebrate host
Metadatos
Afficher la notice complèteEditorial
Frontiers
Materia
Ticks Salivary glands Midgut Repeated exposure Transcriptome
Date
2022-08-04Referencia bibliográfica
Medina JM... [et al.]. (2022) Transcriptomic analysis of the tick midgut and salivary gland responses upon repeated blood-feeding on a vertebrate host. Front. Cell. Infect. Microbiol. 12:919786. doi: [10.3389/fcimb.2022.919786]
Patrocinador
Grant Agency of the Czech Republic 19-382 07247S; ERD Funds 384 CZ.02.1.01/0.0/0.0/16_019/0000759; Programa Operativo FEDER de Andalucia A-BIO-481-UGR18; European Union within ESIF in frame of Operational Programme Research, Development and Education CZ.02.2.69/0.0/0.0/20_079/0017809Résumé
Ticks are blood-feeding arthropods that use the components of their salivary
glands to counter the host’s hemostatic, inflammatory, and immune responses.
The tick midgut also plays a crucial role in hematophagy. It is responsible for
managing blood meals (storage and digestion) and protecting against host
immunity and pathogen infections. Previous transcriptomic studies revealed
the complexity of tick sialomes (salivary gland transcriptomes) and mialomes
(midgut transcriptomes) which encode for protease inhibitors, lipocalins
(histamine-binding proteins), disintegrins, enzymes, and several other tickspecific
proteins. Several studies have demonstrated that mammalian hosts
acquire tick resistance against repeated tick bites. Consequently, there is an
urgent need to uncover how tick sialomes and mialomes respond to resistant
hosts, as they may serve to develop novel tick control strategies and
applications. Here, we mimicked natural repeated tick bites in a laboratory
setting and analyzed gene expression dynamics in the salivary glands and
midguts of adult female ticks. Rabbits were subjected to a primary (feeding on a
naive host) and a secondary infestation of the same host (we re-exposed the
hosts but to other ticks). We used single salivary glands and midguts dissected
from individual siblings adult pathogen-free female Ixodes ricinus to reduce
genetic variability between individual ticks. The comprehensive analysis of 88
obtained RNA-seq data sets allows us to provide high-quality annotated
sialomes and mialomes from individual ticks. Comparisons between fed/
unfed, timepoints, and exposures yielded as many as 3000 putative
differentially expressed genes (DEG). Interestingly, when classifying the exposure DEGs by means of a clustering approach we observed that the
majority of these genes show increased expression at early feeding timepoints
in the mid-gut of re-exposed ticks. The existence of clearly defined
groups of genes with highly similar responses to re-exposure suggests the
existence of molecular swiches. In silico functional analysis shows that these
early feeding reexposure response genes form a dense interaction network at
protein level being related to virtually all aspects of gene expression regulation
and glycosylation. The processed data is available through an easy-to-use
database-associated webpage (https://arn.ugr.es/IxoriDB/) that can serve as a
valuable resource for tick research.