Faculty of Natural Sciences, Division of Cell and Molecular Biology, Sir Alexander Fleming Building, South Kensington Campus, Imperial College London, London SW7 2AZ, United Kingdom.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2009 Dec 15;106(50):21270-5. doi: 10.1073/pnas.0909463106. Epub 2009 Nov 25.
Insect hemocytes mediate important cellular immune responses including phagocytosis and encapsulation and also secrete immune factors such as opsonins, melanization factors, and antimicrobial peptides. However, the molecular composition of these important immune cells has not been elucidated in depth, because of their scarcity in the circulating hemolymph, their adhesion to multiple tissues and the lack of primary culture methods to produce sufficient material for a genome-wide analysis. In this study, we report a genome-wide molecular characterization of circulating hemocytes collected from the hemolymph of adult female Anopheles gambiae mosquitoes--the major mosquito vector of human malaria in subSaharan Africa. Their molecular profile identified 1,485 transcripts with enriched expression in these cells, and many of these genes belong to innate immune gene families. This hemocyte-specific transcriptome is compared to those of Drosophila melanogaster and two other mosquitoes, Aedes aegypti and Armigeres subalbatus. We report the identification of two genes as ubiquitous hemocyte markers and several others as hemocyte subpopulation markers. We assess, via an RNAi screen, the roles in development of Plasmodium berghei of 63 genes expressed in hemocytes and provide a molecular comparison of the transcriptome of these cells during malaria infection.
昆虫血细胞介导体液免疫的重要反应，包括吞噬作用和包被作用，也分泌免疫因子，如调理素、黑化因子和抗菌肽。然而，由于这些重要免疫细胞在循环血液中的数量稀少，它们与多种组织黏附，以及缺乏原代培养方法来产生足够的基因组分析材料，因此它们的分子组成尚未得到深入阐明。在这项研究中，我们报告了从成年雌性冈比亚按蚊（撒哈拉以南非洲地区人类疟疾的主要蚊子传播媒介）血液中的血液中收集的循环血细胞的全基因组分子特征。它们的分子特征确定了 1485 个在这些细胞中富集表达的转录本，其中许多基因属于先天免疫基因家族。这个血细胞特异性转录组与黑腹果蝇（Drosophila melanogaster）和另外两种蚊子（埃及伊蚊和中华按蚊）的转录组进行了比较。我们报告了两种基因作为普遍存在的血细胞标记物的鉴定，以及其他几种作为血细胞亚群标记物的鉴定。我们通过 RNAi 筛选评估了在疟原虫感染过程中 63 个在血细胞中表达的基因对疟原虫伯格氏疟原虫（Plasmodium berghei）发育的作用，并提供了这些细胞在转录水平上对疟疾感染的比较。
