Groundbreaking Lyme Researcher: 'We Need To Do A Better Job At Communicating'

The following Q&A is a continuation of an interview with Tara Moriarty, proprietor of the Moriarty Lab, an infectious diseases research lab that studies primarily Borrelia burgdorferi (Bb) the bacterium that causes Lyme disease. Moriarty is the principal investigator of a new academic paper from the University of Toronto that details the mechanism by which Bb "crawl" through the body -- a scholarly article that turned out to be unexpectedly popular. Tara Moriarty (Photo by Jeff Comber) How do you think your findings about the biomechanics of Lyme disease bacteria may affect treatment of the disease? Your research shows that Bb uses specialized adhesive bonds to "crawl" along the insides of blood vessels.  Tara Moriarty: Absolutely, targeting this adhesion mechanism could be very important for preventing Bb from moving this way, forcing it to stay in the bloodstream and preventing it from escaping into tissues outside the bloodstream. From a treatment point of view, this is by far the most important potential implication of this study. I can't emphasize enough, though, that all of this takes years of work, and that this work is primarily carried out by graduate students, who have to learn the required techniques to do the work (a pretty long process for the work we do), and then repeat and repeat their experiments until they work properly, then do endless new experiments which we realize are needed after we see the results of each preceding experiment, and all this w...
Source: Healthy Living - The Huffington Post - Category: Consumer Health News Source Type: news