Microbial genetic variation impacts host eco-immunological strategies and microparasite fitness in Lyme borreliae-reptile system

Tolerance and resistance are two host eco-immunological strategies in response to microparasite invasion. In the strategy of “resistance”, host responses are induced to decrease microparasite replication while the “tolerance” strategy allows hosts coexistence with microparasites by minimizing responses to avoid immune-mediated damage. The causative agent of Lyme disease is a group of genotypically diverse bacterial species, Borrelia burgdorferi sensu lato (Bb), which is transmitted by Ixodes ticks and persists in different reservoir animals. In North America, eastern fence lizards (Sceloporus undulatus) can be fed on by Ixodes ticks but are incompetent to one genotype of Bb (i.e., ospC type A). However, field-collected lizards showed evidence of previous infection by Bb strains with undefined genotypes. Supporting this evidence, we introduced three genotypically different Bb strains individually to eastern fence lizards and found a Bb genotype-dependent manner of infectivity. We compared liver transcriptomics and observed elevated immune responses triggered by a lizard-incompetent Bb strain (strain B31). We showed two lizard-competent strains with one having no immunomodulation (strain B379) but the other developing upregulated immune responses (strain 297). These results suggest that genetic variation in microparasites both induces different host strategies for dealing with infection and determines microparasite fitness in the hosts. These findings demonstrate that Bb and eastern fence lizards can serve as a model to investigate the mechanisms underlying eco-immunological strategies of tolerance vs. resistance during host-microparasite interaction.