| description |
Ticks are blood sucking mites that have an impact in humans and other animals by the diseases that they carry and by direct effects of blood loss and skin damage. Saliva assists blood feeding by providing a cocktail of anti-clotting, anti-platelet, vasodilatory, anti inflammatory and immunomodullatory substances that disarms host's defenses against blood loss and invading organisms. The tick Rhipicephalus pulchellus parasitizes wild and domestic animals in Africa, mainly ungulates such as zebra, goats and cattle. In this project we have obtained 102,013,516 paired ended sequences from adult females and 139,215,612 sequences from adult male ticks (100 nt long ) feeding for various periods of time on laboratory rabbits. Ticks were dissected in PBS, pH 7.2 and tissues were transferred to RNAlater (Qiagen). The vial was kept in 4 oC for 48 hours to ensure penetration of RNAlater solution into the tissue. Thereafter, it was kept frozen in -30oC till ready for shipment. Reads were assembled with the Abyss software with various k values. The resulting assemblies were joined by an iterative blast and cap3 assembler. Coding sequences were extracted using an automated pipeline, based on similarities to known proteins, or by obtaining coding sequences containing a signal peptide. |