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

蜱虫可以以除鱼以外的大多数脊椎动物的血液为食，并从宿主身上摄取大量血液。此外，它们似乎有一种独特的策略来长时间忍受非宿主状态。自噬是饥饿诱导的，是延长寿命的必要条件，因此我们推测蜱也会发生自噬。从日本牧场最主要蜱类长角血蜱和放牧牛体浆虫病的传播媒介中分离出一些自噬相关基因，并在牛未饲喂期和换毛期表达。结果表明，在长时间的饥饿中，自噬在蜱的存活中起着重要作用。

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.