Teaching interests:

Insect genomics and physiology
Techniques in molecular biology
Advances in functional genomics


Research interests:

The major focus of my lab is in developing control strategies to prevent blood feeding and pathogen-transmission by arthropod ecto-parasites that affect public health and agricultural production using functional genomic and proteomic approaches. Ticks multifunctional salivary glands are vital to their biological success, and also play a critical role in transmission of disease-causing agents to their hosts. I am interested in the elucidation of functional roles of several genes important in salivary vesicular membrane trafficking by silencing those genes using RNA interference and modulating protein secretions in saliva. The goal is to dissect the molecular mechanism by which tick salivary glands secrete proteins and intracellular pathogens in their saliva to modulate host homeostasis and/or suppress host immunity. I am also interested in developing expression profiles to identify the entire battery of tick salivary genes that are differentially expressed by intracellular pathogens. Understanding the interaction of tick-pathogen may lead to new ways to interrupt the life cycle of tick-borne pathogens and new strategies against these diseases.

Selected recent publications:

Karim S, Kenny B, Trioano E, Mather TN: RNAi-mediated gene silencing in tick synganglia: A proof of concept study. BMC Biotechnology 2008, 8:30.

Kotsyfakis M, Karim S, Anderson JF, Mather TN, Ribeiro JMC: Selective Cysteine Protease Inhibition Contributes to Blood Feeding Success of the Tick Ixodes scapularis. Journal of Biological Chemistry 2007, 282:29256-63.

Karim S, Miller NJ, Valenzuela JG, Sauer JR, Mather, TN: RNAi-mediated gene silencing to assess the role of synaptobrevin and cystatin in tick blood feeding, Biochemical and Biophysical Research Communications 2005, 334:1336-1342.

Karim S, Ramakrishnan VJ, Tucker JS, Essenberg RC, Sauer JR: Use of double-stranded RNA interference in Amblyomma americanum salivary glands to knock down tick nSec1 gene. Biochemical and Biophysical Research Communications 2004, 324:1256-1263.

Karim S, Ramakrishnan VJ, Tucker JS, Essenberg RC, Sauer JR: Amblyomma americanum salivary glands: Double-stranded RNA-mediated gene silencing of synaptobrevin homologue and inhibition of PGE2 stimulated protein secretion. Insect Biochemistry and Molecular Biology 2004, 34:407-413.

Karim S, Essenberg RC, Dillwith JW, Tucker JS, Bowman AS, Sauer JR: Identification of SNARE and cell trafficking regulatory proteins in the salivary glands of the lone star tick, Amblyomma americanum (L). Insect Biochemistry and Molecular Biology 2002, 32:1711-1721. (See commentary by Jaworski DC, 2003, Tick “talk”: protein release by tick salivary cells. Trends in Parasitology 19 (10), 427-429).