TY - JOUR TI - A transcriptomic atlas of Aedes aegypti reveals detailed functional organization of major body parts and gut regional specializations in sugar-fed and blood-fed adult females AU - Hixson, Bretta AU - Bing, Xiao-Li AU - Yang, Xiaowei AU - Bonfini, Alessandro AU - Nagy, Peter AU - Buchon, Nicolas A2 - Lemaître, Bruno A2 - Banerjee, Utpal A2 - Pondeville, Emilie VL - 11 PY - 2022 DA - 2022/04/26 SP - e76132 C1 - eLife 2022;11:e76132 DO - 10.7554/eLife.76132 UR - https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.76132 AB - Mosquitoes transmit numerous pathogens, but large gaps remain in our understanding of their physiology. To facilitate explorations of mosquito biology, we have created Aegypti-Atlas (http://aegyptiatlas.buchonlab.com/), an online resource hosting RNAseq profiles of Ae. aegypti body parts (head, thorax, abdomen, gut, Malpighian tubules, ovaries), gut regions (crop, proventriculus, anterior and posterior midgut, hindgut), and a gut time course of blood meal digestion. Using Aegypti-Atlas, we provide insights into regionalization of gut function, blood feeding response, and immune defenses. We find that the anterior and posterior midgut possess digestive specializations which are preserved in the blood-fed state. Blood feeding initiates the sequential induction and repression/depletion of multiple cohorts of peptidases. With respect to defense, immune signaling components, but not recognition or effector molecules, show enrichment in ovaries. Basal expression of antimicrobial peptides is dominated by holotricin and gambicin, which are expressed in carcass and digestive tissues, respectively, in a mutually exclusive manner. In the midgut, gambicin and other effectors are almost exclusively expressed in the anterior regions, while the posterior midgut exhibits hallmarks of immune tolerance. Finally, in a cross-species comparison between Ae. aegypti and Anopheles gambiae midguts, we observe that regional digestive and immune specializations are conserved, indicating that our dataset may be broadly relevant to multiple mosquito species. We demonstrate that the expression of orthologous genes is highly correlated, with the exception of a ‘species signature’ comprising a few highly/disparately expressed genes. With this work, we show the potential of Aegypti-Atlas to unlock a more complete understanding of mosquito biology. KW - Aedes KW - Anopheles KW - RNAseq atlas KW - gut transcriptome KW - blood feeding KW - innate immunity JF - eLife SN - 2050-084X PB - eLife Sciences Publications, Ltd ER -