Data from: Concordance of bacterial communities of two tick species and blood of their shared rodent host

Most macro-organisms house diverse microbial communities and with increasing use of high-throughput sequencing our knowledge of their microbiomes is growing. Of particular interest are disease vectors whose associations with microbes can have significant influences on pathogen transmission and vector competence. We investigated the bacterial community composition and diversity of two tick species, Dermacentor variabilis and Ixodes scapularis, and blood of a shared rodent host, Peromyscus leucopus. The 16S rRNA gene was amplified from genomic DNA from field-collected tick and rodent blood samples and 454 pyrosequencing was used to evaluate their bacterial communities. After quality control, over 300,000 sequences were obtained and 130 Operational Taxonomic Units (OTUs, clustered at 97% similarity) were searched against SILVA to find the best taxonomic match. The most abundant OTUs from each sample type were tick species-specific endosymbionts and Bartonella, a common vector-borne bacterium of rodents. There was considerable overlap in the distribution of OTUs but nonmetric multi-dimensional scaling and C-score analyses indicated that communities from each sample type were significantly different and highly structured. Surprisingly, Bartonella, most commonly described as a flea-vectored bacterium, was present in larvae and nymphs of both tick species, as well as rodent blood. The overlap of many bacterial taxa between tick species and shared hosts may create conditions for movement to new vector species and the evolution of new pathogenic strains.