Dermacentor andersoni Raw sequence reads

Nearly a quarter of emerging infectious diseases in the last century were transmitted by arthropods. Although ticks and insects can carry pathogenic microorganisms, non-pathogenic microbes make up the majority of the microbial community. Currently, the majority of tick microbiome research has had a focus on discovery with descriptive outcomes. Additionally, only a few studies have analyzed the ecology and behavior of the bacterial microbiome of ticks. The goal of this analysis was to characterize the bacterial microbiome of Dermacentor andersoni ticks under different ecological factors, focusing on time and space. In this study, the microbiome of D. andersoni was tissue- and spatial-specific; however, generational variation was dependent on field site. Furthermore, our study showed that the microbiomes of laboratory-reared populations were not representative of the respective field population. We demonstrated that the bacterial microbiome of D. andersoni was dynamic and unique to tick tissue and geographic location. These results provide evidence that ecological variation is a vital component to the complexity of the bacterial microbiome and needs to be further investigated in order to employ microbiome manipulation as a source of pathogen acquisition and transmission interference.