Ixodes ricinus midgut and salivary gland transcriptome and proteome

Ixodes ricinus ticks feed on blood for numerous days depending on their developmental stage and on the animal host in which they attach. Tick attachment to the vertebrate host is an essential step in completing the tick blood-feeding cycle and two tick tissues are involved in securing the uptake and in the metabolism of the host blood, namely the salivary glands and the midgut of the ticks. We employed Illumina sequencing to explore the transcriptome dynamics of the midgut and salivary glands of I.ricinus nymphal and adult ticks. The tissues were collected in 12 hours intervals, up to 24 hours for nymphs and up to 36 hours for adult ticks. After RNA extraction and Illumina sequencing, the short sequence reads were assembled into more than 30,000 contigs. Extensive annotation with a standard methodology (Schwarz et al., 2013) resulted in app. 16,000 coding sequences which are herein submitted in the Genbank. The herein discovered sequences will support high-throughput studies of the biology of this important disease vector and our study sheds light into the largely understudied gene expression regulation in I.ricinus midgut and salivary glands upon tick attachment to the animal host. REFERENCE Schwarz A, von Reumont BM, Erhart J, Chagas AC, Ribeiro JMC, Kotsyfakis M. De novo Ixodes ricinus salivary transcriptome analysis using two different next generation sequencing methodologies The FASEB Journal In Press, PMID: 23964076.