Molecular and morphological studies on roles of autophagy in tick starvation periods and their transmission of protozoan parasites.

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Ticks can feed a blood meal from most vertebrates except for fish and ingest a large amount of blood from hosts. Additionally, they seem to have a unique strategy to endure the off-host state for a long period. Autophagy is induced by starvation condition and is essential for life-span extention, therefore we speculate that autophagy also occurs in ticks. Some autophagy-related genes were isolated in Haemaphysalis longicornis, the most dominant tick in Japanese pastures and vector of piroplasmosis among grazing cattle, and then they were expressed during their unfed and moulting periods. It showed that autophagy plays an important role in tick suvival during long starvation periods.