TickSialoFam (TSFam): A Database That Helps to Classify Tick Salivary Proteins, a Review on Tick Salivary Protein Function and Evolution, With Considerations on the Tick Sialome Switching Phenomenon

Quantitative Visions of Reality at the Tick-Host Interface: Biochemistry, Genomics, Proteomics, and Transcriptomics as Measures of Complete Inventories of the Tick Sialoverse

“…Our insights into salivary gland complexity were heavily skewed at this point in time by the limited number of functions known (Mans and Neitz, 2004b). Even so, we still remain with very few empirically confirmed functions to date (Mans, 2019), although function assignment by homology allowed thousands of potential functions to be assigned to tick proteins (Mans et al, 2016;Pienaar et al, 2018;Ribeiro and Mans, 2020).…”

“…Given this large variation it may be safe to assume that the transcriptomes for salivary glands may not necessarily be representative of the full complement of proteins expressed in the salivary glands. Additionally, it is not yet clear whether the extremely high number of secretory genes found in the transcriptomes (that increase with each new sampling and sequencing effort) is due to artifacts or a tick-specific mechanism to generate genetic diversity (Mans et al, 2016;Ribeiro and Mans, 2020).…”

“…The total number of genes associated with this genome is 37,259 with 24,501 protein coding. However, it has been estimated that as much as 50% of salivary gland proteins may be missing or incomplete in the genome (Ribeiro and Mans, 2020).…”

“…There is therefore a need for a centralized database that would address all of these shortcomings and would include comprehensive inclusion of all tick transcriptomes sequenced to data as well as accurate annotation. To compound this, the unique lineage specific expansions observed in ticks make extraction of functionally relevant information difficult since proteins may only be annotated as "potential secretory protein" or "unknown function" (Ribeiro and Mans, 2020). In many cases, such proteins cannot even be assigned to existing protein families.…”

“…In many cases, such proteins cannot even be assigned to existing protein families. In an attempt to partially address this, a database of secretory proteins has recently been constructed that can be searched by reverse position specific BLAST to assign potential secretory proteins to known secretory families (Ribeiro and Mans, 2020). However, this database only attempted classification of those proteins present in the NCBI nonredundant sequence database and excluded TSA and SRA databases.…”