Current Issues in Molecular Biology, Volume 42, Issue 1

Both the development of the mammalian innate immune system and the antagonistic strategies acquired by alphaherpesviruses to dismantle it have been shaped by co-evolving virus-host interactions over millions of years. Here, we review mechanisms emplo...

Vaccines can be powerful tools, but for some diseases, safe and effective vaccines have been elusive. New developments in nucleic acid sequencing, bioinformatics, and protein modeling are facilitating the discovery of previously unknown antigens thro...

Alphaherpesvirus tegument assembly, secondary envelopment, and exocytosis processes are understood in broad strokes, but many of the individual steps in this pathway, and their molecular and cell biological details, remain unclear. Viral tegument and...

Relapsing fever (RF) is caused by several species of Borrelia; all, except two species, are transmitted to humans by soft (argasid) ticks. The species B. recurrentis is transmitted from one human to another by the body louse, while B. miyamotoi is ve...

Lyme disease Borrelia are obligately parasitic, tick- transmitted, invasive, persistent bacterial pathogens that cause disease in humans and non-reservoir vertebrates primarily through the induction of inflammation. During transmission from the infec...

The quantitative structure-activity relationship (QSAR) approach has been used in numerous chemical compounds as in silico computational assessment for a long time. Further, owing to the high-performance modeling of QSAR, machine learning methods hav...

All members of the Borrelia genus that have been examined harbour a linear chromosome that is about 900 kbp in length, as well as a plethora of both linear and circular plasmids in the 5–220 kbp size range. Genome sequences for 27 Lyme disease Borrel...

Being able to vizualize a pathogen at a site of interaction with a host is an aesthetically appealing idea and the resulting images can be both informative as well as enjoyable to view. Moreover, the approaches used to derive these images can be powe...

Lyme disease (Lyme borreliosis) is a tick-borne, zoonosis of adults and children caused by genospecies of the Borrelia burgdorferi sensu lato complex. The ailment, widespread throughout the Northern Hemisphere, continues to increase globally due to m...

Borrelia (Borreliella) burgdorferi, along with closely related species, is the etiologic agent of Lyme disease. The spirochete subsists in an enzootic cycle that encompasses acquisition from a vertebrate host to a tick vector and transmission from a...

With one exception (epidemic relapsing fever), borreliae are obligately maintained in nature by ticks. Although some Borrelia spp. may be vertically transmitted to subsequent generations of ticks, most require amplification by a vertebrate host becau...

Genetic studies in Borrelia require special consideration of the highly segmented genome, complex growth requirements and evolutionary distance of spirochetes from other genetically tractable bacteria. Despite these challenges, a robust molecular gen...

The genus Borrelia consists of evolutionarily and genetically diverse bacterial species that cause a variety of diseases in humans and domestic animals. These vector-borne spirochetes can be classified into two major evolutionary groups, the Lyme bor...

Borrelia burgdorferi sensu lato causes Lyme borreliosis in a variety of animals and humans. These atypical bacterial pathogens are maintained in a complex enzootic life cycle that primarily involves a vertebrate host and Ixodes spp. ticks. In the Nor...

The mammalian host responds to infection with Borrelia spirochetes through a highly orchestrated immune defense involving innate and adaptive effector functions aimed toward limiting pathogen burdens, minimizing tissue injury, and preventing subseque...

Lyme disease (LD) is an emerging zoonotic infection that is increasing in incidence in North America, Europe, and Asia. With the development of safe and efficacious vaccines, LD can potentially be prevented. Vaccination offers a cost-effective and sa...

Legionnaires' disease and Pontiac fever are both diseases with important public health implications and require prompt and thorough responses to outbreaks for future prevention. Effective methods for defining, diagnosing, reporting and responding to...

The global human population is growing at a rapid rate leading to the need for continued expansion of food animal production to meet the world’s increasing nutritional requirements. As a consequence of this increased production demand, the use of hig...

Alphaherpesviruses, as large double-stranded DNA viruses, were long considered to be genetically stable and to exist in a homogeneous state. Recently, the proliferation of high-throughput sequencing (HTS) and bioinformatics analysis has expanded our...