title: Tracking the sources of blood meals of parasitic arthropods using shotgun proteomics and unidentified tandem mass spectral libraries.
abstract: Identifying the species on which hematophagous arthropods feed is crucial for studying the factors that affect pathogen distributions and that can aid public health. Here we describe a protocol to identify the species a parasitic arthropod has previously fed upon by identifying the source of the remnants of a previous blood meal via shotgun proteomics and spectral matching. The protocol is a nontargeted approach that uses the entire detected blood proteome for source identification; it does not require a priori knowledge of genome or protein sequences. Instead, reference spectral libraries are compiled from the blood of multiple host species by using SpectraST, which takes ∼4 d; the identification of the species from which a previous blood meal of a hematophagous arthropod was taken is achieved with spectral matching against the reference spectral libraries, which takes approximately another 4 d. This method is robust against random degradation of the blood meal and can identify unknown blood remnants months after the feeding event.
authors.affiliation: Department of Biology, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA.
authors.forename: Özlem
authors.initials: Ö
authors.lastname: Önder
authors.affiliation: Bioengineering Graduate Program, Division of Biomedical Engineering, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong, China.
authors.forename: Wenguang
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Shao
authors.affiliation: 1] Bioengineering Graduate Program, Division of Biomedical Engineering, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong, China. [2] Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong, China.
authors.forename: Henry
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Lam
authors.affiliation: Department of Biology, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA.
authors.forename: Dustin
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Brisson
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D001181:Arthropods; D001769:Blood; D018884:Ixodes; D040901:Proteomics / Q000379:methods*; D053719:Tandem Mass Spectrometry / Q000379:methods*; D014714:Vertebrates / Q000097:blood / Q000469:parasitology*