Popillia japonica 16s microbiome

Popillia japonica (Coleoptera: Scarabaeidae) is an invasive pest of Europe and America originally from Japan. In the Azores, this pest was first found on Terceira Island during the sixties and spread to other regions of the nine islands of the Archipelago where it becomes established mostly in pastures. The rate of infestation differs between sites despite the type of vegetation and weather conditions being similar. Aiming to find drivers explaining these differences we hypothesize microbiome could play a role. Therefore, we sampled larvae and soil from sites with high and low rates of infestation to analyze for microbiome by Next-Generation Sequencing. We sequenced twenty four 16S DNA libraries producing 2.445,131 raw input reads which resulted in 598,595 valid reads after checking and denoising raw reads.