Amblyomma americanum adult female salivary gland transcriptome

The tick Amblyomma americanum is a three host tick widespread in the Eastern and Southeastern United States, being a major nuisance and confirmed vector of tularemia and ehrlichiosis to humans and animals, and Theileria cervi to white deer. Previously, a sialotranscriptome of this tick has been reported consisting of 3,869 expressed sequence tags (EST's) from which 145 coding sequences (CDS) have been deposited to GenBank (Aljamali et al, 2009). We presently report an extension of this sialome by assembling over 344 million Illumina sequences totaling over 34 billion nucleotides deriving from four salivary gland cDNA libraries made from A. americanum adult female ticks that were unfed, or fed for 12-48 h, 72-144 h and 6-11 days. We have also used these sequences as targets for a proteome study.