Overlooked No More: Discovering Pathogens in a National Tick Collection

项目总结/摘要 目前对中国蜱传病原体多样性和地理分布的认识 美国仍然有限。迄今为止报道的大多数研究都集中在疏螺旋体上 严格意义上的burgdorferi，莱姆病的病原体， 在该国确诊的病媒传播感染。然而，美国的蜱虫也 传播其他几种病原体，这些病原体带来了额外的、重大的公共卫生问题， 包括斑点热群立克次体属，埃立克体属，巴贝虫属，关于Anaplasma 嗜吞噬细胞菌此外，新的病毒和细菌病原体继续被描述 蜱虫在这里，我们提出了一个小的，独立的项目，以执行二次分析， 一个现有的数据集，即从一千多个滴答声中收集的几千个滴答声， 2018年和2019年，50个州中有49个州的狗和数百只猫。有针对性的，嗯- 将进行表征试验，以检测蜱中已确定的蜱传病原体。 此外，我们将使用下一代测序来表征子集的宏基因组 然后用电子探针查询原始数据，以发现可能 礼物这项工作的结果将为今后的实地工作提供信息，以便更充分地了解 北美蜱传病原体的地理和时间多样性; 了解蜱传感染对公共卫生的真正威胁， 结果.

Project Summary/Abstract Current understanding of the diversity and geographic distribution of tick-borne pathogens in the United States remains limited. The majority of studies reported to date have focused on Borrelia burgdorferi sensu stricto, the causative agent of Lyme disease and the most commonly diagnosed vector-borne infection in the country. However, ticks in the United States also transmit several other pathogens that present additional, significant public health concerns, including spotted fever group Rickettsia spp., Ehrlichia spp., Babesia spp., and Anaplasma phagocytophilum. Moreover, novel viral and bacterial disease agents continue to be described from ticks. Here, we propose a small, self-contained project to perform a secondary analysis of an existing dataset, namely, several thousand ticks collected from more than one thousand dogs and several hundred cats in 49 of the 50 states in 2018 and 2019. Targeted, well- characterized assays will be performed to detect established tick-borne pathogens in the ticks. In addition, we will use next generation sequencing to characterize the metagenome of a subset of the ticks and then query the raw data with e-probes to discover novel agents that may be present. The findings from this work will inform future field efforts to more fully understand the geographic and temporal diversity of tick-borne pathogens in North America; greater understanding of the true public health menace presented by tick-borne infections is expected to result.