Lyme disease is the most reported vector-borne disease in the country. Over the past 20 years, the United States has experienced a dramatic increase in both the number of reported cases and the geographic distribution of the disease. In Virginia, the disease is transmitted by blacklegged ticks, which are infected with the Lyme disease-causing bacterium Borrelia burgdorferi.
Virginia Tech Assistant Professor Brandon Jutras and his lab have continued to tackle the Lyme disease epidemic over the past year, and they have recently identified another missing piece of the Lyme disease puzzle.
“This discovery furthers our understanding of how Borrelia burgdorferi causes inflammation and disease,” said Mari Davis, who is the lead author on the paper, a former master’s graduate of the Jutras lab in the Department of Biochemistry in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. “It is a testament to how unique that this bacterium is — and how we need to keep working to understand more about what is going on behind the scenes in order to develop future diagnostics and treatments.”
Their findings were recently published in PLOS Pathogens, a peer-reviewed open-access medical journal.
Read more at Virginia Tech University
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