Antricola delacruzi Transcriptome or Gene expression. Antricola delacruzi

The present work addresses the following two questions: are salivary glands of A. delacruzi females equipped for hematophagy and/or are they equipped for an alternative source of food such as guano of insectivorous bats? In order to begin to address these questions we generated and annotated a sialotranscriptome for adult females of A. delacruzi collected on bat guano generated from non-normalized cDNA libraries. We compared this sialotranscriptome to similarly constructed sialotranscriptomes from salivary glands of feeding hematophagous females of various species of soft and hard ticks. This exercise revealed that A. delacruzi females are not equipped for hematophagy and that they abundantly express transcripts encoding proteins compatible with functions of guanophagy and defense against fungi and microorganisms.