Generating first-ever transgenic ticks to fight Lyme disease
Ticks are known for transmitting many diseases in animals and humans, especially the deer tick, which is a known carrier of diseases such as Lyme disease, babesiosis and anaplasmosis. Monika Gulia-Nuss is working on generating transgenic ticks in her lab, the first of their kind, in order to explore new strategies to limit the spread of the disease pathogens they carry. Transgenic in this sense means deleting or over-expressing a gene in an organism - in this case the tick. Generating transgenic ticks will not only help the Gulia-Nuss lab to explore new ways of controlling the diseases ticks spread, but also help in understanding the genes involved in tick-pathogen interactions.