School of Biosecurity, Biotechnical and Laboratory Science, College of Veterinary Medicine Animal Resources and Biosecurity, Makerere University, Kampala, Uganda.
International Centre of Insect Physiology and Ecology (ICIPE), Nairobi, Kenya.
Methods Mol Biol. 2022;2411:253-267. doi: 10.1007/978-1-0716-1888-2_15.
Ticks are increasingly a global public health and veterinary concern. They transmit numerous pathogens that are of veterinary and public health importance. Acaricides, livestock breeding for tick resistance, tick handpicking, pasture spelling, and anti-tick vaccines (ATVs) are in use for the control of ticks and tick-borne diseases (TTBDs); acaricides and ATVs being the most and least used TTBD control methods respectively. The overuse and misuse of acaricides has inadvertently selected for tick strains that are resistant to acaricides. Furthermore, vaccines are rare and not commercially available in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). It doesn't help that many of the other methods are labor-intensive and found impractical especially for larger farm operations. The success of TTBD control is therefore dependent on integrating all the currently available methods. Vaccines have been shown to be cheap and effective. However, their large-scale deployment for TTBD control in SSA is hindered by commercial unavailability of efficacious anti-tick vaccines against sub-Saharan African tick strains. Thanks to advances in genomics, transcriptomics, and proteomics technologies, many promising anti-tick vaccine antigens (ATVA) have been identified. However, few of them have been investigated for their potential as ATV candidates. Reverse vaccinology (RV) can be leveraged to accelerate ATV discovery. It is cheap and shortens the lead time from ATVA discovery to vaccine production. This chapter provides a brief overview of recent advances in ATV development, ATVs, ATV effector mechanisms, and anti-tick RV. Additionally, it provides a detailed outline of vaccine antigen selection and analysis using computational methods.
蜱虫越来越成为全球公共卫生和兽医关注的问题。它们传播许多对兽医和公共卫生具有重要意义的病原体。杀蜱剂、培育抗蜱的牲畜、人工摘蜱、牧场轮牧和抗蜱疫苗（ATV）被用于控制蜱虫和蜱传疾病（TTBD）；杀蜱剂和 ATV 分别是使用最多和最少的 TTBD 控制方法。杀蜱剂的过度和不当使用无意中选择了对杀蜱剂具有抗性的蜱虫菌株。此外，疫苗在撒哈拉以南非洲（SSA）很少见且无法商业化。许多其他方法劳动强度大，在实践中并不实用，特别是对于大型农场作业，这也无济于事。因此，TTBD 控制的成功取决于整合所有当前可用的方法。疫苗已被证明既便宜又有效。然而，由于缺乏针对撒哈拉以南非洲蜱虫株的有效抗蜱疫苗，它们在 SSA 大规模用于 TTBD 控制的计划受到阻碍。由于基因组学、转录组学和蛋白质组学技术的进步，已经确定了许多有前途的抗蜱疫苗抗原（ATVA）。然而，其中很少有被研究其作为 ATV 候选物的潜力。反向疫苗学（RV）可以用来加速 ATV 的发现。它成本低廉，并且可以缩短从 ATVA 发现到疫苗生产的时间。本章简要概述了 ATV 开发、ATV、ATV 效应机制和抗蜱 RV 的最新进展。此外，它还详细概述了使用计算方法进行疫苗抗原选择和分析。
