Designing and Expressing a Recombinant Tick Saliva Chimera

Abstract

When ticks feed, they inject numerous proteins into the host that modulate the host’s defense mechanism to tick feeding activity. When animals are repeatedly infested with ticks, they develop an immune response to tick saliva proteins. On these animals ticks have difficulties to complete feeding, acquire, and transmit disease agents, and reproduce. Thus immunization of animals with recombinant tick saliva proteins has been proposed. The strategy of this research is to deliver chimeric tick saliva protein antigens. Three cross-tick species conserved genes that encode for Lone Star tick, Amblyomma americanum tick saliva proteins were identified. cDNA regions that code for putative immunogenic regions were spliced together to make a chimeric tick saliva protein. The recombinant tick saliva protein chimera will be expressed and used to immunize rabbits against tick feeding.