Fig. 5.

New World sand flies exhibit striking lineage-specific expansions of GSTX and GSTD genes. a) Gene counts for each GST class across the 11 phlebotomines. GSTX is the most abundant class in all phlebotomines, while GSTD has expanded in the two Lutzomyia species. b) GSTD and GSTX orthologs display Lutzomyia-specific expansions, while minor changes are observed in the other phlebotomine species. Lutzomyia-specific expansions are indicated within the boxes. The functionally characterized P. argentipes GST, previously labeled as GSTD by Hassan et al. (2021), is actually a GSTX ortholog. c) Violin plots of mean log10-transformed normalized expression values (transcripts per million) of total GST genes on each of the 11 sequenced phlebotomines. GSTD1 and GSTS1 orthologs are consistently among the most highly expressed GST genes. In P. argentipes, the functionally characterized GSTX (Hassan et al. 2021) is the third most highly expressed GST gene. d) Phylogenetic distribution of 276 phlebotomine UGTs into eight families with A. gambiae as reference.