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Project

Exploration of unknown viruses in Belgian ticks

For over a century, viruses have been known as the most abundant and diverse group of entities on Earth, forming a virosphere. Viral zoonoses, i.e., viral infectious diseases harbored by animals or arthropods occasionally spreading to humans, pose a serious threat to public health. Most of these zoonotic infectious diseases are characterized by a strict ecological relationship with their natural arthropod host. Global warming and environmental changes have an undoubted influence on the appearance, distribution, and evolution of these zoonotic viral pathogens. Future climate changes in Europe will facilitate a spread of zoonotic pathogens into previously unaffected regions, and will contribute to increased disease occurrence in endemic areas. There is a need to strengthen preventive measures such as discovery of all zoonotic viruses circulating in the region and subsequent in-depth surveillance activities. Our hypothesis is that the same vector species in different regions have a different structure of the microbiome, and this is one of the factors affecting the spread and manifestation of human zoonotic pathogens. In this context, we propose a comprehensive study aimed to the discovery and comparative analysis of viral and bacterial diversity harbored by Ixodes ricinus or castor bean tick ticks involved in establishing and maintaining of natural foci of e.g., hemorrhagic fevers, Borrelia burgdorferi and tick-borne encephalitis in Europe and West and Central Africa. In vivo infection experiments will be performed to assess associations between the microbiome and vector competence.

Date:5 Oct 2022 →  Today
Keywords:Ticks, Belgium, Virus, Sequencing
Disciplines:Analysis of next-generation sequence data, Virology, Infectious diseases, Genomics
Project type:PhD project