Interestingly, some intracellular endosymbionts of ticks share close and complex evolutionary links with tick-borne pathogens of humans, such as Coxiella burnetii and Francisella tularensis, with Coxiella-like and Francisella-like endosymbionts (CLEs and FLEs, respectively) occurring in a wide range of ticks worldwide. Ticks rely on bacterial endosymbionts to provide nutrients lacking from their highly restricted blood-centred diet, as evidenced by the observation that ticks treated with antibiotics show decreased fitness at all life stages. These gaps in our knowledge highlight the need for microbial surveillance in tick vectors to assess the risk of infection in humans and animals. Furthermore, as most tick-borne pathogens are hard to grow in the laboratory and the ticks themselves may be hard to identify on morphological grounds, our understanding of pathogen and tick population structure and the fine-grained genomic epidemiology of tick-borne infections remains patchy. Many tick-borne infections remain undiagnosed and the prevalence, diversity and virulence potential of tick-borne agents remain poorly understood. Aside from negative effects on human and animal morbidity and mortality, ticks and tick-borne diseases are responsible for huge global production losses, amounting to US$ 14–19 billion per annum. Across the world, ticks act as vectors of human and animal pathogens (including viruses, bacteria and protozoa), often mediating transfer of infection from one host species to another, including zoonotic infections of humans. Ticks are ectoparasitic arthropods that feed exclusively on the blood of their vertebrate hosts. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.Ĭompeting interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. MJP and AR received startup funds from Quadram Institute Bioscience ( ). All metagenome sequence files are available from the Sequence Read Archive (Bioproject number SUB4459771).įunding: MJP, SE, AN received a BBSRC-GCRF-IAA award for ~£15000 from the BBSRC ( ). This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.ĭata Availability: All relevant data are within the manuscript and its Supporting Information files. Received: AugAccepted: NovemPublished: January 14, 2019Ĭopyright: © 2019 Ravi et al. PLoS Negl Trop Dis 13(1):Įditor: Aysegul Taylan Ozkan, Hitit University, Faculty of Medicine, TURKEY (2019) Metagenomic profiling of ticks: Identification of novel rickettsial genomes and detection of tick-borne canine parvovirus. From the metagenome of a dog tick from Jericho, we generated a genome sequence of a canine parvovirus.Ĭitation: Ravi A, Ereqat S, Al-Jawabreh A, Abdeen Z, Abu Shamma O, Hall H, et al. A sheep tick yielded sequences from the sheep pathogen Anaplasma ovis, while Hyalomma ticks from camels yielded sequences belonging to Francisella-like endosymbionts. Ticks from a dog and a sheep yielded draft genome sequences of Coxiella strains. Analysis of signature genes showed that the other represents the first genome sequence of the potential pathogen Candidatus Rickettsia barbariae. One of the resulting genomes was highly similar to Rickettsia massiliae strain MTU5. Two ticks isolated from sheep yielded an abundance of reads from the genus Rickettsia, which were assembled into draft genomes. We developed a two-stage protocol that includes 16S-amplicon screening of pooled samples of hard ticks collected from dogs, sheep and camels in Palestine, followed by shotgun metagenomics on individual ticks to detect and characterise tick-borne pathogens and endosymbionts.
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