Background: The mosquito, Anopheles gambiae, is the primary vector of human malaria, a disease responsible for
millions of deaths each year. To improve strategies for controlling transmission of the causative parasite,
Plasmodium falciparum, we require a thorough understanding of the developmental mechanisms, physiological
processes and evolutionary pressures affecting life-history traits in the mosquito. Identifying genes expressed in
particular tissues or involved in specific biological processes is an essential part of this process.
Results: In this study, we present transcription profiles for ~82% of annotated Anopheles genes in dissected adult
male and female tissues. The sensitivity afforded by examining dissected tissues found gene activity in an
additional 20% of the genome that is undetected when using whole-animal samples. The somatic and
reproductive tissues we examined each displayed patterns of sexually dimorphic and tissue-specific expression.
By comparing expression profiles with Drosophila melanogaster we also assessed which genes are well conserved
within the Diptera versus those that are more recently evolved.
Conclusions: Our expression atlas and associated publicly available database, the MozAtlas (http://www.tissue-atlas.
org), provides information on the relative strength and specificity of gene expression in several somatic and
reproductive tissues, isolated from a single strain grown under uniform conditions. The data will serve as a
reference for other mosquito researchers by providing a simple method for identifying where genes are expressed
in the adult, however, in addition our resource will also provide insights into the evolutionary diversity associated
with gene expression levels among species.