Effects of Live and Peptide-Based Antimicrobiota Vaccines on Ixodes ricinus Fitness, Microbiota, and Acquisition of Tick-Borne Pathogens
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study explored the effects of antimicrobiota vaccines on the acquisition of Borrelia and Rickettsia, and on the microbiota composition of Ixodes ricinus ticks. Using a murine model, we investigated the immunological responses to live Staphylococcus epidermidis and multi-antigenic peptide (MAP) vaccines. Immunized mice were infected with either Borrelia afzelii or Rickettsia helvetica, and subsequently infested with pathogen-free I. ricinus nymphs. We monitored the tick feeding behavior, survival rates, and infection levels. Additionally, we employed comprehensive microbiota analyses, including the alpha and beta diversity assessments and microbial co-occurrence network construction. Our results indicate that both live S. epidermidis and MAP vaccines elicited significant antibody responses in mice, with notable bactericidal effects against S. epidermidis. The vaccination altered the feeding patterns and fitness of the ticks, with the Live vaccine group showing a higher weight and faster feeding time. Microbiota analysis revealed significant shifts in the beta diversity between vaccine groups, with distinct microbial networks and taxa abundances observed. Notably, the MAP vaccine group exhibited a more robust and complex network structure, while the Live vaccine group demonstrated resilience to microbial perturbations. However, the effects of antimicrobiota vaccination on Borrelia acquisition appeared taxon-dependent, as inferred from our results and previous findings on microbiota-driven pathogen refractoriness. Staphylococcus-based vaccines altered the microbiota composition but had no effect on B. afzelii infection, and yielded inconclusive results for R. helvetica. In contrast, previous studies suggest that E. coli-based microbiota modulation can induce a pathogen-refractory state, highlighting the importance of both bacterial species and peptide selection in shaping microbiota-driven pathogen susceptibility. However, a direct comparison under identical experimental conditions across multiple taxa is required to confirm this taxon-specific effect. These findings suggest that antimicrobiota vaccination influences tick fitness and microbiota assembly, but its effects on pathogen transmission depend on the bacterial taxon targeted and the selected peptide epitopes. This research provides insights into the need for strategic bacterial taxon selection to enhance vaccine efficacy in controlling tick-borne diseases.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".