Background: Mosquito saliva is a complex cocktail whose pharmacological properties play an essential role in
blood feeding by counteracting host physiological response to tissue injury. Moreover, vector borne pathogens are
transmitted to vertebrates and exposed to their immune system in the context of mosquito saliva which, in virtue
of its immunomodulatory properties, can modify the local environment at the feeding site and eventually affect
pathogen transmission. In addition, the host antibody response to salivary proteins may be used to assess human
exposure to mosquito vectors. Even though the role of quite a few mosquito salivary proteins has been clarified in
the last decade, we still completely ignore the physiological role of many of them as well as the extent of their
involvement in the complex interactions taking place between the mosquito vectors, the pathogens they transmit
and the vertebrate host. The recent release of the genomes of 16 Anopheles species offered the opportunity to get
insights into function and evolution of salivary protein families in anopheline mosquitoes.
Results: Orthologues of fifty three Anopheles gambiae salivary proteins were retrieved and annotated from 18
additional anopheline species belonging to the three subgenera Cellia, Anopheles, and Nyssorhynchus. Our analysis
included 824 full-length salivary proteins from 24 different families and allowed the identification of 79 novel
salivary genes and re-annotation of 379 wrong predictions. The comparative, structural and phylogenetic analyses
yielded an unprecedented view of the anopheline salivary repertoires and of their evolution over 100 million years
of anopheline radiation shedding light on mechanisms and evolutionary forces that contributed shaping the
anopheline sialomes.
Conclusions: We provide here a comprehensive description, classification and evolutionary overview of the main
anopheline salivary protein families and identify two novel candidate markers of human exposure to malaria vectors
worldwide. This anopheline sialome catalogue, which is easily accessible as hyperlinked spreadsheet, is expected to
be useful to the vector biology community and to improve the capacity to gain a deeper understanding of
mosquito salivary proteins facilitating their possible exploitation for epidemiological and/or pathogen-vector-host
interaction studies
