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💯 These guys are fascinating - I could watch them swim around all day!

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.

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!