tailieunhanh - Báo cáo khoa học: A family of putative metalloproteases in the salivary glands of the tick Ixodes ricinus

Ticks are obligate blood-feeding arachnids. During their long-lasting blood meal, they have to counteract the protective barriers and defense mecha-nisms of their host. These include tissue integrity, pain, hemostasis, and the inflammatory and immune reactions. Here, we describe a multigene family coding for five putative salivary metalloproteases induced during the blood meal ofIxodes ricinus. | ỊFEBS Journal A family of putative metalloproteases in the salivary glands of the tick Ixodes ricinus Yves Decrem1 Jerome Beaufays1 Virginie Blasioli1 Kathia Lahaye1 Michel Brossard2 Luc Vanhammer and Edmond Godfroid1 1 IBMM Institut de Biologie et Medecine Moleculaires Universite Libre de Bruxelles Gosselies Belgium 2 Institut de Biologie Universite de Neuchatel Switzerland Keywords fibrinolysis Ixodes ricinus metalloprotease tick tick saliva Correspondence E. Godfroid Institute of Molecular Biology and Medicine Universite Libre de Bruxelles Rue des Professeurs Jeener et Brachet 12 B-6041 Gosselies Belgium Fax 32 2 6509900 Tel 32 2 6509934 E-mail These authors contributed equally to this work Database The full-length cDNA sequences of metisl to metis5 have been submitted to the EMBL Sequence Nucleotide Database under the accession numbers AM747806 AM747807 AM747808 AM747809 and AM747810 respectively Received 1 October 2007 revised 10 December 2007 accepted 23 January 2008 doi Ticks are obligate blood-feeding arachnids. During their long-lasting blood meal they have to counteract the protective barriers and defense mechanisms of their host. These include tissue integrity pain hemostasis and the inflammatory and immune reactions. Here we describe a multigene family coding for five putative salivary metalloproteases induced during the blood meal of Ixodes ricinus. The evolutionary divergence inside the family was driven by positive Darwinian selection. This came together with individual variation of expression functional heterogeneity and antigenic diversification. Inhibition of the expression of some of these genes by RNA interference prevented completion of the tick blood meal and affected the ability of the tick saliva to interfere with host fibrinolysis. This family of proteins could therefore participate in the inhibition of wound healing after the tick bite thereby facilitating the completion of the .