Recent Innovative Study on Artificial Tick Feeding Systems

Written by UMass undergraduate student Venus Seyis

Ticks may seem like purely a nuisance creature to many people, but at the Laboratory of Medical Zoology at UMass Amherst a team of student researchers are learning more about what makes ticks, well, tick. 

Myself and the team here know that ticks are important to us simply as humans because they drink our blood and can pass on bacteria that cause a variety of illnesses. Many experiments researchers in this field set up are based on the observation of ticks feeding on an animal (host). The relationship between the tick and the host is parasitic and, as scientists, part of the job is to acquire information to combat problems we face in the most ethical means possible. By introducing artificial feeding systems, not only can researchers reduce harm to animals, but we can collect the information needed to fight pathogens.

In an article published in 2020, researchers at Washington State University (WSU) and the Agricultural Research Service (ARS, the U.S. Department of Agriculture's primary in-house research agency) introduced a new tick feeding system that is not only an effective demonstration of tick feeding, but is also completely automated. This system can remove the use of animals in tick feeding experiments and is one we are eager to incorporate into our work here at UMass. Scientists have created a system that mimics the skin of an animal the tick would like to bite by using something called a membrane. Instead of using an animal’s skin and blood, a membrane-based system provides the ticks what they need to eat and reproduce—a place to bite and blood to feed on. The WSU and ARS researchers utilized the membrane feeding system to show that when ticks feed on infected blood, the bacteria travel throughout the tick and develop. Ticks infected with this bacteria were shown to pass the infection onto blood that didn’t contain bacteria before feeding. 

Artificial feeding systems present a new avenue for tick-pathogen research, effectively minimizing the amount of animal research that needs to be conducted. The system provided by Vimonish et. al. (2020) is a noticeable upgrade to previous artificial membrane feeding systems and one that student researchers like myself are excited to begin using.