Project Number: 5348-32000-028-04
Project Type: Specific Cooperative Agreement

Start Date: Mar 31, 2006
End Date: Jan 22, 2011

Objective:
The objective of this cooperative research project is to discover tick antigens that can be used in strategies for vaccination of cattle against both ticks and tick-borne pathogens using a combination of anti-tick and anti-pathogen antigens in a single vaccine.

Approach:
The approach will be to feed Rhipicephalus appendiculatus ticks on cattle infected with Theileria parva, the etiologic agent of East Coast Fever (ECF). Tick stocks that are susceptible and refractory to infection will be used. Ticks will be dissected and the guts isolated at time points deemed to be critical for gut and salivary gland related events of importance in the parasite lifecycle. Infected and uninfected ticks from both susceptible and refractory strains will be sampled at various time points. mRNA will be isolated from tick tissue samples (guts and salivary glands) and cDNA will be synthisized. Then suppression subtractive hybridization will be used to obtain clones of genes that are expresssed in response to infection or blood feeding by comparing susceptible with refractory, infected with uninfected, etc. BSL-1; 6-30-07. Documents SCA with International Livestock Research Institute, Nairobi. Formerly 5348-32000-020-04S. (January 2007)