MK-1775 Continued dependence on traditional chemical methods is becoming increasingly problematic in the face of ever greater demand for environmental protection and fear of chemical poisoning. To search for alternatives to chemical control, a better understanding of the neurologic processes that control basic tick physiological processes is needed. Ixodid ticks must gorge on blood, often increasing 100 fold in body size, in order to stimulate tissue development, ecdysis, mating and reproduction. Precisely how the tick’s nervous system regulates these biological processes is largely unknown. During feeding, some synganglion cells, especially the neurosecretory cells, increase in size and accumulate neurosecretory substances. Neurohormones and neurotransmitters play key roles in tick development and physiology. Work has been conducted examining their occurrence in selected tissues in ticks such as the hemocytes, midgut, ovaries, and salivary glands. However, much of the work on neurotransmitters focuses on the dopaminergic system in the salivary glands. Much less is known about the transcribed genes in the tick synganglia, largely because of the difficulty in extracting sufficient amounts of tissue. Advances in sequencing technology now allow researchers to rapidly obtain large amounts of data from a small amount of tissue. Recent work by Simo et al. showed the existence of a complex neuropeptidergic network extending to different body tissues as well as within the synganglion. However, the molecular basis for understanding just how these complex neurohormone-controlled networks regulate tick physiological functions remains to be determined. To this end, a global search to identify and characterize the numerous molecules expressed in the synganglion is needed. Transcriptomics offers an excellent tool to approach this problem. Using 454 pyrosequencing, Bissinger et al. generated a cDNA library of expressed genes in the synganglion of adult female American dog ticks, Dermacentor variabilis and predicted many of the neuropeptides, neuropeptide receptors, neurotransmitters, iron transport proteins, transmembrane proteins, stress reduction proteins and numerous housekeeping genes. Previous studies by Donohue et al. using similar methods identified 14 neuropeptides and 5 neuropeptide receptors in this same species. Transcriptome analysis of the synganglion of the brown dog tick, Rhipicephalus sanguineus, was done with cDNA library construction in phage resistant Escherichia coli. However, this method yielded a total of only 1008 ESTs sequenced, with only 603 remaining after removal of vector contamination that could be clustered into unique transcripts. Neuropeptides and their receptors have also been predicted in several species of hard ticks using bioinformatics and immunohistochemistry and identified by MALDI-TOF/ TOF mass spectrometry. Despite these few studies, there is a paucity of information about the neurobiology of ticks. Solexa/Illumina, 454 pyrosequencing, and other next generation sequencing technologies provide high levels of coverage far exceeding previous methods.