Generation of Virus-Infected Ticks: Synchronous Infection and Feeding on Viremic Animals

Although many hematophagous arthropods transmit pathogens to humans and animals, Ixodid ticks are unique in that the feeding process lasts for days to weeks instead of a few minutes. To facilitate feeding, tick saliva suppresses host responses, which would permit detection and removal and has been shown to impact disease transmission and severity. Using infected ticks to transmit the virus to a host, the resulting disease course and pathology should resemble naturally occurring cases more closely than simply injecting the virus through a needle. In this work, we describe methods to generate virus-infected ticks for use in transmission experiments.