Two species are mixed among themselves: the Pavlovsokgo tick and the taiga tick, which threatens a person in the material "KP" -Novosibirsk ".
Scientists from Novosibirsk and Tomsk made a discovery: it turned out that mites-hybrids live in Siberia. They were caught in the area of the Tomsk village of Kolarovo, as well as in Tomsk itself, not far from the Kedr stadium. According to biologists, such hybrids can become sources of new strains of tick-borne infections. While the world is struggling with the COVID-19 coronavirus, shouldn't you be afraid of another infection? And, in general, where did this tick-borne "mix" come from? We tried to understand these issues together with scientists.
Scientists of the Biological Institute of TSU found the first hybrids two years ago, sent them for research to the Novosibirsk Virological Center "Vector". And there it was laboratory confirmed: bloodsuckers are atypical, but a cross between two species: the taiga tick and the Pavlovsky tick. Outwardly, they are very similar, the difference is in their habitats. The taiga tick prefers coniferous forests, and the Pavlovsky tick loves leafy trees. But both parasitize on the same animals, at the same time.
In order not to disappear, ticks, which are less common in nature, "enter into marriages" with males and females of another, more numerous species. This is how a whole generation of "kids" of mixed blood appeared. And they took the "best" from their parents. Now they can live, even in the grass, even in a vacant lot, even in conifers, even in deciduous forests, they feel great in a dry litter - on paths in parks.
“At the same time, the hybrids carry all the same infectious agents as their ancestors, and this does not bring anything good to humans,” said Sergei Tkachev, KP-Novosibirsk, PhD in Biological Sciences, a researcher at the Institute of Chemical Biology and Fundamental Medicine of the SB RAS. - They carry both the encephalitis virus and borreliosis, and other pathogens. There are a lot of hybrids in Siberia, but it is difficult to name the numbers, no one counted them.
The main danger of this explosive mixture is the emergence of new strains of viruses. The same tick-borne encephalitis. Nina Moskvitina, head of the biodiversity monitoring laboratory at BI TSU, warns about this:
- When viruses enter a new environment, introgression can occur - the exchange of genetic material. As a result, new variants of viruses appear that lose a number of old properties and acquire new ones, for example, their pathogenicity or the course of human disease they provoke changes. Therefore, of course, hybrid mites require close study, says Moskvitina.
Tomsk scientists even give an example: in 2008, they sent ticks to "Vector", which carried a new, then still unknown strain of tick-borne encephalitis virus, it was named "Kolarovo-2008".
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- As it turned out later, the strain turned out to be recombinant, that is, it combined genomic regions of different types of the virus. It is possible that the starting point for its appearance was precisely the hybridization of ticks, they suggest at TSU.
RYZHKIN'S HOPE
