Life Sciences Commons^™

Determination Of The Dermacentor Variabilis Ferritin Gene Exon And Intron Structure, Dana Sylvestre

Honors College Theses

The American dog tick Dermacentor variabilis is a hard body, 3-host tick that relies on the blood of small and large mammals to satisfy its metabolic demands. The excess iron consumed in its blood diet can cause cellular damage through oxidation. Ticks rely on the ferritin protein to metabolize iron. For this reason, it is important to further characterize the ferritin gene. After extracting DNA from D. variabilis ticks, the suspected ferritin gene was amplified through polymerase chain reaction (PCR) and purified. The putative ferritin DNA fragment was inserted into plasmids and isolated in a long PCR length gene cloning. …