Skare, Jon Regents Professor and Associate Head

Jon Skare is Regents Professor and Associate Head of the Department of Microbial Pathogenesis and Immunology in the College of Medicine at Texas A&M University. He has been a faculty member at Texas A&M since 1996 and has led a research laboratory centered around the pathogenic mechanisms operative in Borrelia burgdorferi, the spirochetal bacterium that causes Lyme disease. He has published over 50 peer reviewed manuscript, reviews, and book chapters and been funded continuously by the NIH since 1999 with over $20 million dollars in total costs. Dr. Skare has trained ten graduate students, sixteen postdoctoral fellows, and numerous undergraduate students in his research group during his time at Texas A&M. The majority of his postdoctoral trainees and students have gone on to hold academic or industry positions in the medical sciences.



Research interests are focused on microbial pathogenesis with an emphasis in spirochetal infections, particularly Borrelia burgdorferi, the etiologic agent of Lyme disease. Broad training in the molecular biology, genetics, and biochemistry of prokaryotic systems is employed to answer research-related questions. Long-term interests in the lab are centered on understanding how B. burgdorferi promotes its pathogenic potential and persists in the disparate hosts it occupies in nature (e.g., both ticks and mammals). In this regard, the research program is aligned with: (i) regulatory pathways that contribute to the establishment of infection during the arthropod to mammalian transition; (ii) identifying and characterizing surface structures that contribute to the colonization and maintenance of infection via adherence mechanisms; and (iii) the ability of B. burgdorferi and relapsing fever Borrelia to persistently infect hosts in the face of a potent innate and adaptive immune response.