Lyme disease in seabirds

Last updated on Friday, 1 Apr 2022

I completed my second year of master’s degree under the supervision of Karen McCoy (MIVEGEC, Montpellier) and studied the impact of the specialization of tick vectors on the specialization of borrelia, the bacterium responsible for Lyme disease.

This experience allowed me to do field work (2 months in the North of Norway including 1 month on the island of Hornoya), to familiarize myself with wet lab as well as with phylogenetic analyses (Maximum likelihood) and molecular variance (AMOVA).

In this study we show that host seabirds are reservoirs of a great diversity of borrelia Duneau et al., 2008 and we apply a method to correctly quantify the prevalence of borrelia in tick vectors Gómez-Díaz et al., 2010. This study was probably the embryo of my idea that differences within the same host species (here tick races, but then sexes) can have a very strong influence on the specialization of parasites.

Lyme_disease Former
David Duneau
David Duneau
PhD in Evolutionary parasitology

Related

Publications

Cryptic vector divergence masks vector-specific patterns of infection: an example from the marine cycle of Lyme borreliosis.

We combine site-occupancy modeling and molecular assays to evaluate patterns of infection in the marine cycle of Lyme borreliosis. Our results show that bacterial detection varies strongly among tick races leading to vector-specific biases if raw counts are used to calculate Borrelia prevalence. Overall prevalence is higher than suspected and certain vector–host combinations likely contribute more than others to the local dynamics and large-scale dispersal of Borrelia spirochetes.
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Prevalence and diversity of Lyme borreliosis bacteria in marine birds

We studied the diversity of Borrelia spp. circulating in seabirds. Our findings indicate that Lyme disease spirochetes circulating in the marine system are more diverse than previously described and support the hypothesis that seabirds may be an important component in the global epidemiology and evolution of Lyme disease.
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