Ticks!
Despite a number of years working with the tiny bloodsuckers, Dr. Kevin Friesen has never been bitten by a tick – outside of a university science lab. But he’s constantly surprising people when he tells them that ticks do live in Alberta, and not just in labs.
“There are more tick species in Ontario, Quebec and especially the Maritimes, but we do have a lot of ticks here in Alberta,” he says.
A faculty member in the Biological Sciences department, Kevin researches tick reproduction and development, with a current focus on how ticks produce eggs.
Alien creatures
“I had no interest in insects or ticks or anything at all in the invertebrate physiology stream until about the third year of my undergraduate degree,” he says, “and then I took my first entomology course and just loved it. Insects are alien creatures compared to what we are.”
Kevin’s PhD research looked at how the female tick transitions from being full of blood to laying eggs before she dies. He studied how hormone signals play a role in this process.
Creepy crawly alert: “The female African tick will grow to 100 times her size to where she’ll look like an olive,” he explains. “She’ll lay about 20,000 eggs when she’s done eating. That whole process takes about 10 days.”
Inside the egg
After coming to the university, Kevin began researching what happens inside the egg after it’s laid and how the embryo develops. Over the summer he began collaborating with two MacEwan University students and a researcher at the University of Alberta.
“Embryos are fairly simple to look at,” he says. “They’re self-contained, developing organisms. You can basically preserve them at different stages and manipulate them.” Once they’re preserved, Kevin can see which genes are active at certain developmental stages.
Disease transmitters
“Ticks are vectors for many different diseases, including bacterial or viral infections in humans or other animals. That’s one reason why our research is important. We’re always looking for ways to control tick populations and therefore help to prevent disease transmission.” Therefore, studying tick reproduction and development becomes key to understanding how diseases are spread by ticks.
Kevin’s summer students helped him isolate and extract genetic material from the embryos for later review, and set up slides that will help shed more light on the anatomy of the embryos.
Independent student research
He adds that volunteer summer work or projects through the university’s Research, Scholarly Activity and Creative Achievement Fund are not the only opportunities for student research. This past fall term, the Biological Sciences department launched Biology 498, which allows students to conduct independent research under supervision.
Kevin says the hardest part for students is coming up with an idea in the first place. Although intrepid students are welcome to bring forward suggestions for research projects, faculty members can offer them a starting point using faculty projects or earlier class assignments.
“From my experience as an undergraduate student, I wanted ideas at the early stage because research can be a scary area when you’re first starting. Students have a lot of great ideas too, but sometimes it’s nice to have that first little step.”
Outside of teaching, Kevin moves along with the tick research and looks forward to producing a paper in the near future.
“We’ve been getting some initial results and we’ve identified some genes that are interesting to us, but we have to do a few more steps to get the results to publication.”
