The sialotranscriptome of adult male Anopheles gambiae mosquitoes

Abstract

Adult mosquitoes feed on sugary meals to obtain energy for flight and other activities, while anautogenous females take a blood meal to develop eggs. Accordingly, female but not male salivary glands possess several antihemostatic components to facilitate acquisition of blood, while both sexes have activities related to digestion of the sugar meal as well as antimicrobials to maintain meal integrity. Studies on adult female sialotranscriptomes indicated a set of approximately 70 proteins and peptides possibly secreted in saliva that presumably facilitate sugar and blood meals. Most of these proteins have no known function, so no assignment to blood or sugar feeding is possible. Microarray and RT-PCR studies attempted to identify sex specificity of these transcripts. Our present study complements the previous data set, comparing approximately 1000 randomly sequenced clones of a male adult salivary gland cDNA library with the female set. Statistically significant differences were found in 16 transcripts found exclusively in the female library, 4 transcripts significantly female enriched but also found in male glands, and 6 transcripts enriched in male glands. We additionally found a transcript in male salivary glands with a trypsin inhibitor-like (TIL) domain that we presume codes for an antimicrobial peptide; a novel defensin transcript was also found in the male sialotranscriptome. Supplemental tables can be found at.