Infection resistance and tolerance in Peromyscus spp., natural reservoirs of microbes that are virulent for humans

Abstract

The widely-distributed North American species Peromyscus leucopus and P. maniculatus of cricetine rodents are, between them, important natural reservoirs for several zoonotic diseases of humans: Lyme disease, human granulocytic anaplasmosis, babesiosis, erhlichiosis, hard tickborne relapsing fever, Powassan virus encephalitis, hantavirus pulmonary syndrome, and plague. While these infections are frequently disabling and sometimes fatal for humans, the peromyscines display little pathology and apparently suffer few consequences, even when prevalence of persistent infection in a population is high. While these Peromyscus spp. are unable to clear some of the infections, they appear to have partial resistance, which limits the burden of the pathogen. In addition, they display traits of infection tolerance, which reduces the damage of the infection. Research on these complementary resistance and tolerance phenomena in Peromyscus has relevance both for disease control measures targeting natural reservoirs and for understanding the mechanisms of the comparatively greater sickness of many humans with these and other infections.

Lyme Disease Frontiers: Reconciling Borrelia Biology and Clinical Conundrums

“…It has therefore evolved an arsenal of defenses to protect itself from metabolic stress and extrinsic attack (for example, by the innate and adaptive immune system), and it utilizes a repertoire of strategies to disseminate from the site of inoculation and invade distal tissues. In traditional reservoir hosts like the white-footed mouse, Bb infection most often manifests as a persistent, asymptomatic infection [15,153], whereas inbred laboratory models such as the C3H/He background suffer debilitating tissue pathologies [154], as discussed in Section 3.1. Longstanding infection has been described both in untreated model organisms and humans [155].…”

Modeling Powassan virus infection in Peromyscus leucopus, a natural host

“…However, limited conclusions regarding pathogenesis in these mice could be drawn from these studies. A recent review also cites resistance or tolerance to POWV in Peromyscus mice, suggesting that the species may act as natural reservoirs [ 41 ]. Therefore, we decided to rigorously model POWV infection in this natural host.…”

The Role of Mammalian Reservoir Hosts in Tick-Borne Flavivirus Biology

“…Some wild-caught mice, such as P. maniculatus and P. truei were seropositive against POWV/DTV at 6% (2/33) and 22.2% (9/22), respectively (Deardorff et al, 2013 ). Peromyscus mice are also established reservoirs for other pathogens such as Borrelia species responsible for Lyme disease and hantaviruses, which cause hantavirus cardio-pulmonary syndrome (Schmaljohn and Hjelle, 1997 ; Morzunov et al, 1998 ; Monroe et al, 1999 ; Barbour, 2016 ). However, infectious POWV/DTV has not been isolated from any wild-caught Peromyscus species to date.…”