Tick Biology, Disease Transmission and Control

by Ravi Kant Upadhyay, Nidhi Yadav

2025 · Cambridge Scholars Publishing

In nature, heterotrophs compete for food, forming ecological food chains. Herbivores rely on plants and live symbiotically, while carnivores and ectoparasites like ticks depend on other animals, leading parasitic lives. Ticks are ectoparasites that need blood meals to fulfill their nutritional requirements and attach to hosts using suctorial mouthparts. This book offers a detailed overview of tick feeding, salivary secretions, and the immune responses in hosts. It explores how ticks transmit pathogens through saliva, causing diseases in humans, wild animals, and livestock. The book also examines the physiological effects of tick saliva toxins and their role in pathogenesis and allergy. It includes chapters on isolating tick saliva toxins, producing polyclonal antibodies, and control methods for ticks. With recent scientific discoveries, it serves as a valuable resource for scientists, doctors, veterinarians, and tick biology experts, addressing tickborne infections and their economic impact.

Cancer Systems Biology

by Ravi Salgia, Mohit Kumar Jolly, Prakash Kulkarni, Govindan Rangarajanm

2025 · Oxford University Press

Over the centuries, civilization has seen considerable advances in healthcare. Cancer is among the most challenging healthcare issues that we face today, but a number of discoveries have led to better care. Despite all the progress and the promise regarding early detection and precision medicine, we are still faced with the nettlesome problem - cancer is a moving target. Even within an individual tumour, deep sequencing analyses now indicate multiple, phenotypically distinct subpopulations, whose representation seems to vary dramatically from one stage to the next as the tumour progresses. Cancer Systems Biology provides state-of-the-art reviews and thought-provoking ideas in a concise and succinct manner. This insightful textbook is a crosspollination of concepts from multiple disciplines and experimental approaches to study cancer. The chapters provide new ideas and thoughts outlining how a quantitative picture of cancer can provide a deeper understanding of the disease, and how a systems level perspective may hold the key to fully comprehend how cancer arises and progresses. Written by experts in multiple disciplines, including systems biologists, science researchers, physicists, mathematicians, and clinicians, Cancer Systems Biology provides a comprehensive, up-to-date, treatise devoted to understanding cancer from a systems perspective. Providing new conceptual insights that can aid precision medicine, it will be essential reading for academic researchers in the field, clinicians, graduate students, and scientists with an interest in cancer biology.