Dr. Jon T. Skare

My laboratory studies Borrelia burgdorferi, the spirochetal bacterium that causes Lyme disease. B. burgdorferi is the most common arthropod-borne infectious agent in the United States, with over 35,000 cases reported to the CDC in 2008. This number represented a 30% increase from the previous year, indicating that B. burgdorferi is a re-emerging infectious agent.

The goals of my research are to understand how B. burgdorferi causes disease and adapts to different niches it occupies by: (1) addressing the role of attachment, colonization and subsequent dissemination using newly developed genetic methodologies to inactivate genes involved in adherence ofB. burgdorferi to host tissues; and (2) understanding how B. burgdorferiresponds to oxidative stress via the function of the global regulatory protein BosR.

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