Vectors as Epidemiological Sentinels: Patterns of Within-Tick Borrelia burgdorferi Diversity.

ABSTRACT: Hosts including humans, other vertebrates, and arthropods, are frequently infected with heterogeneous populations of pathogens. Within-host pathogen diversity has major implications for human health, epidemiology, and pathogen evolution. However, pathogen diversity within-hosts is difficult to characterize and little is known about the levels and sources of within-host diversity maintained in natural populations of disease vectors. Here, we examine genomic variation of the Lyme disease bacteria, Borrelia burgdorferi (Bb), in 98 individual field-collected tick vectors as a model for study of within-host processes. Deep population sequencing reveals extensive and previously undocumented levels of Bb variation: the majority (~70%) of ticks harbor mixed strain infections, which we define as le

SUBMITTER: Walter KS 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4944968 | biostudies-literature | 2016 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature