Mosquito-Borne Diseases and Omics: Tissue-Restricted Expression and Alternative Splicing Revealed by Transcriptome Profiling of Anopheles stephensi

Abstract

Malaria is one of the most debilitating mosquito-borne diseases with high global health burdens. While much of the research on malaria and mosquito-borne diseases is focused on Africa, Southeast Asia accounts for a sizable portion of the global burden of malaria. Moreover, about 50% of the Asian malaria incidence and deaths have been from India. A promising development in this context is that the completion of genome sequence of Anopheles stephensi, a major malaria vector in Asia, offers new opportunities for global health innovation, including the progress in deciphering the vectorial ability of this mosquito species at a molecular level. Moving forward, tissue-based expression profiling would be the next obvious step in understanding gene functions of An. stephensi. We report in this article, to the best of our knowledge, the first in-depth study on tissue-based transcriptomic profile of four important organs (midgut, Malpighian tubules, fat body, and ovary) of adult female An. stephensi mosquitoes. In all, we identified over 20,000 transcripts corresponding to more than 12,000 gene loci from these four tissues. We present and discuss the tissue-based expression profiles of majority of annotated transcripts in An. stephensi genome, and the dynamics of their alternative splicing in these tissues, in this study. The domain-based Gene Ontology analysis of the differentially expressed transcripts in each of the mosquito tissue indicated enrichment of transcripts with proteolytic activity in midgut; transporter activity in Malpighian tubules; cell cycle, DNA replication, and repair activities in ovaries; and oxidoreductase activities in fat body. Tissue-based study of transcript expression and gene functions markedly enhances our understanding of this important malaria vector, and in turn, offers rationales for further studies on vectorial ability and identification of novel molecular targets to intercept malaria transmission.

Integrated Multi-Omic Analysis of Mycobacterium tuberculosis H37Ra Redefines Virulence Attributes

“…Construction of cDNA libraries was carried out following manufacturers' instructions. Amplified cDNA fragments were sequenced using Illumina HiSeq2500 platform (Illumina Inc., San Diego, USA) (Sreenivasamurthy et al, 2017 ).…”

Proteome data of Anopheles stephensi ovary using high-resolution mass spectrometry

“…4 , Supplementary Table S5 ). However, these proteins were not restricted only to the ovaries and were also observed to be expressed in midgut, fatbody and salivary glands [1] , [10] , [11] , [12] . The complete list of proteins identified in ovaries that mapped to the list of vector proteins with experimentally proven roles in parasite development is provided in ( Supplementary Table S6 ).…”

Proteome data of Anopheles stephensi salivary glands using high-resolution mass spectrometry analysis

“…We observed 31 of such proteins to be expressed in the A. stephensi salivary glands. Among these, 30 proteins were also identified in midgut, fatbody, ovary and brain [1] , [13] , [14] , [15] . We observed the expression of ASTEI03572 gene to be enriched only in the A. stephensi salivary glands.…”