I was interviewed by a company, who is interested in providing general public information of Lyme disease prevention. I'd say the information there is mostly correct and fair if you want to learn the "drama/history/development" of Lyme disease prevention! youtube.com/watch?v=q8utqb…

Very happy to announce that the website of Lin lab at Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine 🐕🐈🐴🐄🦅 is online! sites.tufts.edu/yipinlinlab/

🚨 The Department of Microbiology & Cell Biology at Montana State University invites applications for an Assistant Professor tenure-track faculty position in the field of environmental microbiology. Happy to answer any questions! jobs.montana.edu/postings/45680

Finally after three flights, three Germany national rail train ride (all three rides delayed), I arrived at Weimar, Germany. All I need is to go to bed immediately 🥱 Ready for the exciting International Symposium of tick borne diseases conference (ISTTBD) tomorrow!

Always great to meet up with old friends/collaborators Peter, Klemen, Kalvis in the ticks meeting at Weimar (ISTTBD). This is the meeting I learned the most information relevant to my research in recent years!

Finally, Time for my talk! “Tick-pathogen anti-complement evolution dictates host immunomodulation for multimodal Lyme borreliae transmission” Photo credits from Peter Kraiczy’s student, Flavia.

Thanks Tufts University for our story with Maria Elena Bottazzi, WenHsiang Chen, Kalvis Brangulis, Chinglin Hsieh to turn a bacterial protein people gave up hope into a powerful Lyme disease vaccine candidate! shorturl.at/nESG5 Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine 🐕🐈🐴🐄🦅 From the Labs at Baylor College of Medicine Texas Children's Tufts University Lyme Disease Initiative

Field season starts so I’m heading to Sapporo (Hokkaido) at Japan to collect the Asian Ixodes ticks carrying Lyme disease bacteria! Good luck to get many ticks!

At Kushiro, Japan visiting Dr. Saito, the lead scientist in Kushiro Marsh Wildlife Conservation Center. They specialise in rehabilitation of endangered eagles and owls. Many DVMs here treated wildlife animals, put reporters to prepare their release.

Many eagle species here in Kushiro wildlife conservation center are endangered and specific to Japan including White-tailed eagles. Each summer, the scientists and DVMs here also search for their nests, sample/band the birds to monitor their health and also track their migration.

We’re Traveling to Nemuro, Hokkaido to collect ticks. This site is also a bird banding station as it is on the fall migration route of wild birds. We met local bird bander setting up the mist net, saw the endangered red crown crane, learned banders study the bird migration route

In Hokkaido, there’re three major tick species that can be collected via dragging (Ixodes persulcatus, Ixodes ovatus, and Haemaphysalis spp). I. Persulcatus transmits Lyme disease bacteria in northern Asia. are focusing on this tick but differentiating tick species is not easy

Although Ixodes persulcatus tick is the major tick species transmitting human Lyme infectious bacteria in northern Asia, the other tick species can also transmit those human important Lyme bacteria. That is “Ixodes pavlovski “ take a look to see how we can differentiate them.

Come to join my technician, Miranda, and the summer DVM students, Renner and Audrey. We are going to the field to trap birds in understanding wild birds’ role in tickborne diseases!

The first step of trapping the birds is to identify the sites that is at the edge of the wood so you’ll have lots of birds passing by. Setting up the net absolutely needs some efforts. Check on my DVM student, Audrey, working very hard to set up the net

The most challenging work of mist netting is to take the birds from entangled net while the birds are screaming. Here are examples of woodpeckers and catbirds. My DVM student, Renner, worked very hard to take out the birds from the net. That’s his first time!

We then have to be very careful to collect samples (blood) and take out the ticks. Some birds (like Veery) really had loads of the ticks. Let’s culture the Lyme bacteria from ticks and see what genotypes we got!

Thanks for the Association of American University sharing our work!