Immunology and Infectious Disease Commons^™

Parasites, Proteomics And Performance: Effects Of Gregarine Gut Parasites On Dragonfly Flight Muscle Composition And Function, Rudolf J. Schilder, James H. Marden

School of Biological Sciences: Faculty Publications

In previous work, we found that dragonflies infected with gregarine gut parasites have reduced muscle power output, loss of lipid oxidation in their flight muscles, and a suite of symptoms similar to mammalian metabolic syndrome. Here, we test the hypothesis that changes in muscle protein composition underlie the observed changes in contractile performance. We found that gregarine infection was associated with a 10-fold average reduction in abundance of a ~155·kDa fragment of muscle myosin heavy chain (MHC; ~206·kDa intact size). Insect MHC gene sequences contain evolutionarily conserved amino acid motifs predicted for calpain cleavage, and we found that calpain digestion …