Transcriptome analysis of the salivary glands of the female tick Amblyomma americanum (Acari: Ixodidae).

Ticks infest a wide range of hosts while bypassing their immune, inflammatory and haemostatic responses during their extended feeding, which may last for more than two weeks. Here, we present a transcriptome analysis of 3868 expressed sequence tags (ESTs) from three cDNA libraries generated from the salivary glands of adult female Ambyomma americanum ticks at different stages of feeding. We applied a normalization step for one library, significantly decreasing the abundance of mitochondrial sequences amongst the 2292 sequences from the normalized library.