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. 2017 Feb 13;10:79. doi: 10.1186/s13071-017-2005-z

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© The Author(s). 2017

Open AccessThis article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.

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Fig. 1 — Haemoglobin digestion in mosquitoes and ticks. a Host erythrocytes undergo lysis and release haemoglobin (Hb) and other proteins in the lumen of the midgut (1). In mosquitoes, proteases are secreted in the gut lumen for initial Hb extracellular digestion (2), generating peptides that will be further internalized and hydrolyzed in the epithelial cells (3). b In ticks, Hb is internalized by receptor-mediated endocytosis (2) and directed to large endosomal vesicles that fuse with lysosomes containing cysteine and aspartic proteases where it is degraded (3). Upon degradation of Hb, free heme must be detoxified (4)