Anti-thrombosis Repertoire of Blood-feeding Horsefly Salivary Glands*□S

Blood-feeding arthropods rely heavily on the pharmaco-logical properties of their saliva to get a blood meal and suppress immune reactions of hosts. Little information is available on antihemostatic substances in horsefly sali-vary glands although their saliva has been thought to contain wide range of physiologically active molecules. In traditional Eastern medicine, horseflies are used as anti-thrombosis material for hundreds of years. By proteomics coupling transcriptome analysis with pharmacological testing, several families of proteins or peptides, which exert mainly on anti-thrombosis functions, were identified and characterized from 60,000 pairs of salivary glands of the horsefly Tabanus yao Macquart (Diptera, Tabanidae). They are: (I) ten fibrin(ogen)olytic enzymes, which hydrolyze specially alpha chain of fibrin(ogen) and are the first famil