Dados do Trabalho

Título

Comparative genomic analysis of C-type lectin genes in the Anopheles aquasalis with other American anophelines and the African An. gambiae

Introdução

C-type lectins are part of the set of molecular pattern recognition proteins of pathogens in animals and plants. In An. gambiae some of these proteins act as agonists of murine and human plasmodia, being of interest as a control mechanism of the malaria parasite. The genomic data could help search for these genetic elements to study their effects on other mosquito species

Objetivo(s)

The objective was to identify C-type lectins from the An. aquasalis mosquito.

Material e Métodos

Such as to identify C-type lectins from the An. aquasalis mosquito were used homology methods and evaluated evolutionary inferences with sequences of proteins of mosquito An. gambiae and other New World anophelines. The protein sequences of An. aquasalis were obtained from genome annotation (GCA_002846955.1) by Prado-Maciel et al. (unpublished data). The identification of the sequences of interest was carried out through searches with a standard protein-protein BLAST using the C-type lectins of An. gambiae as query proteins from the Vectorbase database against the annotated An. aquasalis. The result was used as a query to perform searches with the blastp tool against the An. gambiae protein database. The same methodology was used to select proteins from the An. albimanus and An. darlingi both also downloaded from the Vectorbase website. The result selection parameters were identity values >35% and e-value <0,005. For the evolutionary analysis, a phylogenetic tree was constructed using the Neighbor-joining method, with 1000 bootstrap replicas on MEGA X.

Resultados e Conclusão

In An. aquasalis, 12 C-type lectin proteins were identified, a result lower than the composition in the other anophelines like An. albimanus with 15 proteins, An. darlingi with 17 and An. gambiae with 23 proteins. According to the phylogenetic tree, nine clades were preserved and the species An. gambiae suffered an expansion in the family compared to the other analyzed anophelines. Despite the differences in the composition of C-type lectin genes, anophelines retain groups related to the activation of melanization, which are relevant in the fight against plasmodia and other pathogens.

Palavras-chave

Phylogenetics, homology, anophelines, plasmodia, and genome.