Abstract
Ticks are important vectors of viruses that infect and cause disease in man, livestock, and companion animals. The major focus of investigation of tick-borne viruses has been the interaction with the mammalian host, particularly the mechanisms underlying disease and the development of vaccines to prevent infection. Only recently has research begun to investigate the interaction of the virus with the tick host. This is striking when considering that the virus spends far more time infecting the tick vector relative to the vertebrate host. The assumption has been that the tick host and virus have evolved to reach an equilibrium whereby virus infection does not impede the tick life cycle and conversely, the tick does not restrict virus replication and through blood-feeding on vertebrates, disseminates the virus. The development and application of new technologies to tick-pathogen interactions has been fuelled by a number of developments in recent years. This includes the release of the first draft of a tick genome, that of Ixodes scapularis, and the availability of tick-cell lines as convenient models to investigate interactions. One of the by-products of these investigations has been the observation of familiar proteins in new situations. One such protein family is Toll and Toll-like receptors that in vertebrates play a key role in detection of microorganisms, including viruses. But does Toll signaling play a similar role in detection of virus infection in ticks, and if it does, how does this affect the maintenance of viruses within the tick?
Highlights
Ticks are important vectors of viruses that infect and cause disease in man, livestock, and companion animals
Irrespective of the precise date that hematophagous behavior evolved, it is clearly measured in millions of years and implies a long period over which ticks were in turn parasitized by microorganisms that are found in abundance in ticks extant today (Vayssier-Taussat et al, 2015)
It is not clear what impact this infection has on the tick and there is little evidence that this impact is deleterious in the way that certain viruses are to insects (Carlson et al, 2006; Chen and Siede, 2007; Xu and Cherry, 2014)
Summary
Ticks are important vectors of viruses that infect and cause disease in man, livestock, and companion animals. The major focus of investigation of tick-borne viruses has been the interaction with the mammalian host, the mechanisms underlying disease and the development of vaccines to prevent infection. Recently has research begun to investigate the interaction of the virus with the tick host.
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