MOSCOW, May 15. Three new types of ticks, which can be carriers of diseases such as plague and West Nile fever, were discovered and described by TMU scientists. According to experts, these parasites are widespread in Siberia and Mongolia. The results of the study were published in the Persian Journal of Acarology.
Scientists at the Tyumen Medical University (TMU) concluded that the collected specimens can be described as new species after studying a huge amount of literature, including in Chinese and Japanese.< br />«
“The discovered parasites belong to two families – Spinturnicidae and Macronyssidae. Representatives of the first family are known as carriers of bartonellosis, and the second — a number of dangerous natural focal infections, including tick-borne encephalitis, borreliosis, West Nile fever, hemorrhagic fever with renal syndrome, tularemia and plague, «said Candidate of Biological Sciences, Associate Professor of the Tyumen Medical Maria Orlova University.
One of the ticks was obtained in 2020 from the preserved collections of the Zoological Museum of Moscow State University, when the existing collections of bats were examined. The rest were collected in vivo from bats caught in Buryatia and Tuva, which were then released into the wild.
Bats carry a wide variety of pathogens, including COVID-19.
«External parasites of bats, such as ticks, fleas, and blood-sucking flies, are actively involved in maintaining pathogens inside bat colonies. Bats are colonial animals and form large clusters, which additionally contributes to the spread of diseases among them,» Orlova said. 
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She explained that research on bats in Siberia and the Far East had been carried out by a research team over the past ten years, and earlier it seemed that the fauna of their parasites had already been sufficiently studied. Several new species were described by the group back in 2015. No further studies were foreseen, since only one family of bat hosts lives in the study area.
Morphologically, the mites are not similar to those described earlier. Apparently, this faunal complex lives south of the Asian part of Russia, presumably in China. The further goal of the scientific team is cooperation with Chinese specialists.
The development of the work should be molecular genetic studies that will explain the relationship of discovered species with already known ones, as well as the study of the participation of parasites in the circulation of various infections.
Tyumen Medical University is a participant in the Priority-2030 state support program for universities in the Russian Federation.