Molecular and antigenic characterisation of Ehrlichia ruminantium in Amblyomma variegatum ticks and in vitro cultures

The rickettsial pathogen Ehrlichia ruminantium, transmitted by ticks of the genus Amblyomma, causes heartwater, an economically important, often fatal disease of domestic and wild ruminants in sub-Saharan Africa and in the Caribbean. The studies described in this thesis have contributed to understanding several aspects of heartwater. First, a real-time PCR method was developed in order to study the kinetics of infection with E. ruminantium in the mammalian host. The assay was validated for specificity and sensitivity and was used to estimate numbers of the organisms in the blood of infected sheep. However, organisms were only detected during the clinical phase of infection, indicating that the way in which it was applied did not provide sufficient sensitivity to follow the early stages of infection. This PCR assay was then used, together with transcription and proteomic analyses, to investigate differential gene expression of E. ruminantium in the arthropod and mammalian hosts, in order to identify genes that may allow the organisms to successfully adapt to different environments. These studies used in vitro tick and mammalian cell culture systems, as well as tissues from infected A. variegatum ticks, and initially focused on the map1 multigene family. Although transcripts for most of the map1 paralogs were detected in organisms grown in vitro, in both mammalian and tick cells, only transcripts from map1 and map1-1 were detected in infected ticks. Moreover, map1-1 transcripts were more abundant in midguts than in salivary glands whereas map1 transcripts were most abundant in salivary glands and were expressed at higher levels following several days of tick feeding on a mammalian host. Because of the quantities of material required, proteomic analysis was only possible using in vitro-cultured organisms. Comparison of proteins encoded by the map1 cluster in E. ruminantium grown in tick or bovine endothelial cell cultures, using 2D gels and MALDI-TOF analysis, revealed that different proteins predominated in the corresponding spots in 2D gels from the different cultures; products of the map1-1 gene were abundant in tick cells, while products of map1 were abundant in endothelial cells. The detection of higher levels of map1 transcripts in salivary glands than in midguts of infected ticks, together with the presence of abundant MAP1 protein in organisms grown in mammalian but not in tick cell lines, suggest that expression of this protein may be associated with infectivity for mammalian cells. In contrast, map1-1 transcripts were abundant both in midguts of infected ticks and in tick cell lines, and the protein was expressed at high levels in infected tick cell cultures. Since both of these stages have low infectivity for sheep, these results suggest that the MAP1-1 protein may play an important role within the vector, possibly associated with colonisation and replication of E. ruminantium in the tick midgut. Collectively these findings suggest that this multigene family is involved in functions of biological relevance in different stages of the life cycle of E. ruminantium. Lastly the suppression subtractive hybridisation (SSH) technique was applied to RNA extracted from E. ruminantium-infected endothelial and tick cell cultures in an attempt to sample a large portion of the E. ruminantium genome for differentially expressed genes; although not resulting in identification of any differentially transcribed genes in the present study, this method was shown to work in principle.