Assessment of a 16S rRNA amplicon Illumina sequencing procedure for studying the microbiome of a symbiont-rich aphid genus

The bacterial communities inhabiting arthropods are generally dominated by a few endosymbionts that play an important role in the ecology of their hosts. Rather than comparing bacterial species richness across samples, ecological studies on arthropod endosymbionts often seek to identify the main bacterial strains associated with each specimen studied. The filtering out of contaminants from the results and the accurate taxonomic assignment of sequences are therefore crucial in arthropod microbiome studies. We aimed here to validate an Illumina 16S rRNA gene sequencing protocol and analytical pipeline for investigating endosymbiotic bacteria associated with aphids. Using replicate DNA samples from 12 species (Aphididae: Lachninae, Cinara) and several controls, we removed individual sequences not meeting a minimum threshold number of reads in each sample and carried out taxonomic assignment for the remaining sequences. With this approach, we show that: i) contaminants accounted for a negli...