Rhipicephalus zambeziensis Transcriptome or Gene expression

Ticks inject a diverse mixture of secretory proteins into the host to evade its immune response and facilitate blood feeding, making secretory proteins attractive targets for the production of recombinant anti-tick vaccines. Next generation sequencing has advanced sequence availability for ticks in recent years and has assisted the characterisation of secretory proteins. Male and female Rhipicephalus zambeziensis ticks were collected at different times during feeding (unfed, 3 days-fed and 5 days-fed), salivary glands dissected and RNA extracted. The Illumina Hiseq and Miseq instruments were used to generated sequence reads and the Trinity software package was used for de novo transcriptome assembly. Annotation by blast and putative open reading frame prediction were performed.