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Alternative Approach to Lyme Disease Vaccine Development Shows Promise in Pre-clinical Models Research team finds genetic engineered Lyme bacterial proteins could offer long-standing protection against infection while requiring fewer vaccinations.

Congratulations to Yi-Pin Lin and colleagues of @TuftsLyme for their latest publication in Nature Comm. An engineered alternative to OspA vaccines! How to make weakly immunogenic proteins better vaccine candidates. . . tinyurl.com/bdf3utbs

Borrelia burgdorferi loses essential genetic elements and cell proliferative potential during stationary phase in culture but not in the tick vector | Journal of Bacteriology Borrelia burgdorferi causes Lyme disease, a prevalent tick-borne illness. B. burgdorferi must survive long periods (months to a year) of apparent dormancy in the midgut of the tick vector between bloo...

Catching up on our reading and found this terrific article from the Jacobs lab looking at one of the plagues of working with B. burgdorferi--plasmid loss. Shout out to our Boston colleague Nick Takacs for some excellent work! journals.asm.org/doi/full/10....

Up close and personal profile of Tufts' Chair of Microbiology and Lyme researcher extraordinare John Leong. Currently feverishly at work with Melissa Caimano on the next Biology of Spirochetes GRC! medicine.tufts.edu/news-events/...

Peromyscus leucopus, Mus musculus, and humans have distinct transcriptomic responses to larval Ixodes scapularis bites | Infection and Immunity Ixodes scapularis (formerly Ixodes dammini) ticks are the most important invertebrate vector of human diseases in North America (1). These ticks are responsible for spreading most cases of Lyme disease (predominantly caused by Borrelia burgdorferi sensu stricto in North America), which affects an estimated 476,000 individuals in the United States yearly (2), as well as six other human pathogens—Anaplasma phagocytophilum, Babesia microti, Borrelia miyamotoi, Borrelia mayonii, Ehrlichia muris eauclairensis, and deer tick virus/Powassan virus (3, 4). Tick feeding can trigger immunologic processes at the bite site in the skin, which may threaten the ability of the tick to survive during the blood meal (5). To prevent this from occurring, Ixodes ticks secrete saliva containing anticoagulants and immunomodulatory compounds into the feeding site, which dampens the host’s immune response and ensures that the tick can remain attached until completion of feeding (6–8). This secretion also contributes to the spread of B. burgdorferi into new hosts, both by providing a mechanism to exit the tick (9–11) and by dampening the immune response while the pathogen establishes the infection (12–19).

Another one through peer review—many thanks to the reviewers and editor who helped us improve this along the way. New insight into how reservoirs and humans interact with *larval* Ixodes scapularis ticks.

And as always, thanks for supporting me and the work, @tuftslyme.bsky.social

On the phone with clinicians from Martha's Vineyard today and they are seeing a huge rise in Amblyomma (lone star) ticks and alpha gal syndrome which we haven't seen on the mainland in MA. Anyone else seeing major increases?

Meet the Phase 3 teams at Demo Day - LymeX Diagnostic Prize On November 21, join the LymeX Diagnostics Prize at the Phase 3 Demo Day in New York City. The teams will showcase their proposed solutions to government and industry stakeholders, including clinician...

So nice to see so many old friends and new at the LymeX DemoDay at the Hess Center in NYC. www.lymexdiagnosticsprize.com/register-for...