cities-as-interfaces-zoonotic-hazard-emergence-development-new-york

Cities As Interfaces of Zoonotic Hazard Emergence: Development of the New York City Tick and Wildlife Urban Surveillance System

Tick-borne hazards in urban landscapes are increasing, yet critical gaps remain in understanding human tick-borne disease risk across urbanization ...

Columbia University

As cities seek to provide more habitat for wildlife, there may be unintended consequences of increasing tick-borne disease hazards. In the United States, the Northeast is both highly urban and a hotspot for blacklegged ticks () and tick-borne disease emergence. Though tick-borne disease was once considered a suburban and rural problem, tick-borne hazards in urban landscapes are increasing.

Functional connectivity for white-tailed deer drives the distribution of tick-borne pathogens in a highly urbanized setting.

Ticks are vectors of many debilitating pathogens that are transmitted during blood meal acquisition. As both vector and pathogen species continue to emerge, there is a critical need for improved pathogen diagnostic and host remnant identification methods to develop interventions. Current pathogen detection methods are limited in their ability to subtype and detect emerging variants and non-vector borne "look-alike" diseases. Determination of tick blood meal sources is also an elusive step for understanding tick interactions with the biotic community in a given environment, with consequences for environmental management and disease prevention strategies. We have created an accessible hybridization capture next-generation sequencing panel called "TICKHUNTER" to improve molecular detection and subtyping of bacterial and parasitic pathogens in both clinical and tick samples. For disease ecology studies, the panel also detects host blood meal sources of interest. An alternative method for unbiased blood meal remnant analysis is also presented. We find that TICKHUNTER is a promising tool for effective and accurate detection of a variety of tick-borne pathogens, based on comparable linearity, limit of detection, sensitivity, and specificity to real-time PCR. Additionally, it can detect and characterize unexpected pathogens due to the large capacity for multiplexing and flexibility in variant detection.

TICKHUNTER: A Targeted Hybridization-Capture Sequencing Approach for the Detection and Characterization of Tick-borne Pathogens and Blood Meals.

Clinical testing and public health surveillance can be significantly improved by incorporating sequencing-based molecular detection and subtyping for real-time monitoring of virus evolution. With phylogenetic analysis used for speciation and variant subtyping, target analyte specificity can be relaxed well beyond typical parameters acceptable in PCR-based diagnostics. Hybrid capture is a promising way to enrich large numbers of sequences with maximal flexibility, using standard molecular biology laboratory equipment and small benchtop sequencers. Here, we report the development and bench validation of a hybrid capture based next-generation sequencing diagnostic panel for all known viral tick-borne pathogens, TITAN-RNA. Based on systematic testing with simulated novel viruses and field samples, we determined a 10% tolerance for evenly distributed mutations or 27% tolerance for naturally occurring viral divergence. The TITAN-RNA extrapolated limit of detection in blood is 19.1 genome copies by complementary log-log analysis, and linearity performance (R ≥ 0.99) is amenable for its use as a quantitative assay. As proof of principle for public health surveillance and evolutionary studies, we report two putatively novel segmented like viruses in New York State, USA, identified from the invasive  tick.

Article	Year
Functional connectivity for white-tailed deer drives the distribution of tick-borne pathogens in a highly urbanized setting. Landscape ecology\| PubMed ID: 40270782	2025
TICKHUNTER: A Targeted Hybridization-Capture Sequencing Approach for the Detection and Characterization of Tick-borne Pathogens and Blood Meals. bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology\| PubMed ID: 40501899	2025
TITAN-RNA: A hybrid-capture sequencing panel detects known and unknown for diagnostics and vector surveillance. bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology\| PubMed ID: 40501929	2025

Marie V. Lilly

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