Bacterial Microbiome of the American Dog Tick, Dermacentor variabilis

The American dog tick, Dermacentor variabilis Say, is the principal vector of spotted fever group rickettsiae that cause illness in people. Because the composition and structure of microbial communities in D. variabilis are poorly understood, we conducted high-throughput amplicon sequencing of the 16S rRNA gene to characterize the bacterial communities of adult D. variabilis ticks collected from field populations in North Carolina.