Scientists at University of California-Irvine are cracking the code to Lyme disease.
Dr. Alan Barbour and Dr. Anthony Long led a research team that spent four years decoding the genome of the white-footed mouse—a wetland rodent known to harbor Lyme disease. The team’s study was published in Science Advances.
Lyme disease is caused by a bacteria that usually infects people via tick bite. Typical symptoms include fevers, headaches, fatigue, and skin rashes.
Although the disease usually occurs in heavily wooded areas of the Midwest and Northeast, it has spread westward in recent years. In 2017, Lyme disease diagnoses rose over 17% from 2016 with more than 40,000 new cases. These numbers are triple that of the early ’90s.
“Many efforts to combat Lyme disease have focused on trying to control those ticks,” Barbour said in a statement.
Instead of controlling the ticks, the scientists want to know why the rodents don’t develop Lyme disease even though they carry the bacteria.
“Understanding what shields them from getting sick could guide us in protecting humans from it,” Barbour said.
Barbour, a professor of medicine, microbiology and molecular genetics at the UCI School of Medicine, was a co-discoverer of Borrelia burgdorferi, the bacteria that causes Lyme disease.
The researchers worked on the complex task of determining the DNA letter sequence that makes up the animal’s genome. With 2.45 billion of those letters representing nucleotides that form DNA’s basic structural unit, its genome is similar in size to that of humans, UCI said.
“If you want to understand a species, knowing its genetic blueprint is invaluable,” Long said.
The scientists are considering vaccinating the white-footed mice in the wild, a process used to prevent rabies transmission in other kinds of animals.
