Dana Shaw
banner
shawlab.bsky.social
Dana Shaw
@shawlab.bsky.social
930 followers 410 following 28 posts
Associate Professor at WSU studying how and why ticks transmit disease 🦠🕷🩸🧬🧫 www.shawlab.org
Posts Media Videos Starter Packs
Pinned
Thrilled to see this out in PNAS today!!🎉 Big congratulations to graduate student @kaylee-vosbigian.bsky.social on her first, first-author paper!

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
💯 These guys are fascinating - I could watch them swim around all day!
Check these guys out! #MicroSky #LymeDisease
You’ve heard of #Lymedisease, but have you ever seen the bacteria that causes it? 🦠 Borrelia burgdorferi, the spiral-shaped culprit transmitted by ticks, swims with a creepy wriggling motion and uses #chemotaxis to navigate. Both fascinating... and disgusting #Microsky 🧪 #IDsky @shawlab.bsky.social
These results indicate that ATR could impact Ixodes population dynamics, prevalence of infected ticks, and pathogen circulation in the wild!
When challenged with Borrelia or Anaplasma, larvae fed on sensitized mice ingested more bacteria. Notably, although sex did not impact larval feeding success, it did influence pathogen load in the tick, suggesting that undefined variables between male and female mice influence transmission dynamics.
Ticks fed on sensitized mice ingested more host leukocytes when compared to those fed on naïve hosts, which rarely ingested nucleated cells.
…with an influx of basophils, eosinophils, neutrophils, and T lymphocytes
Mice exhibited increasingly severe inflammation at tick bite sites...
Repeated I. scapularis larval infestations on P. leucopus lead to reduced feeding success (over 50%) and decreased blood meal weight.
Check out the latest Nature Microbiology Journal Club article written by Cameron Coyle spotlighting the diverse roles that tick haemocytes have in arthropod immunity and fitness!

This piece highlights @rolandelliagus.bsky.social and Joao Pedra’s work, linked here: www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Sunday funday 🤩 🚲 🏊🏻‍♀️
Reposted by Dana Shaw
University of Nebraska-Lincoln is hiring an Assistant Professor specializing in insect systematics. Opportunities like this are rare and valuable! (Not many jobs like this out there!) Spread the word to anyone who might be interested or benefit.
#entomology #science #sciencejobs #bugsky 🧪
Thrilled to see this out in PNAS today!!🎉 Big congratulations to graduate student @kaylee-vosbigian.bsky.social on her first, first-author paper!

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
Spring evening on the Palouse with my best girl
Repping the WSU CVM today at the Pullman science rally! #standupforscience
Reposted by Dana Shaw
If you have been affected by the fires in LA, or are concerned about your ability to keep precious Drosophila strains going during the latest funding crisis, we will host your strains as a backup. Please email me.

Please amplify. If you are also able to host fly strains, add your name as well.
Given that lipid hijacking is common among arthropod-borne microbes, ATF6-mediated induction of Stomatin may be a mechanism that is exploited in many vector-pathogen relationships for the survival and persistence of transmissible microbes!
Using ArthroQuest, we found that, in contrast to humans, the large majority of arthropods had positive hits in the promoter regions of Stomatin orthologs, suggesting that the ATF6-regulated nature of Stomatin may be a common feature among blood-feeding arthropods!