LAUSR

Aquaporins (AQPs), or water channel proteins, are highly conserved across species. These transmembrane proteins promote water and solute transport across cell membranes. No AQP‑related proteins have been identified in mites to date. The present study used transcriptomics (RNA‑sequencing) to identify potential AQPs in the mite species Blomia tropicalis. Molecular cloning techniques were then used to obtain the full‑length gene sequences encoding these AQP family members, and bioinformatics analyses were used to categorize them based on similarity to AQPs in other species. This approach led to the identification of 5 putative AQP‑coding sequences, known as BlotAQP1‑5 (GenBank accession numbers: KX655540, KX655541, KX655542, KX655543 and KX655544, respectively), which were indexed into all three subgroups, i.e., AQPs, aquaglyceroporins and superAQPs. To the best of our knowledge, these represent the first known AQPs in any mite species. Further studies are required to investigate their functional roles in water transport and their potential as drug targets.