Skin microbiomes of Bynoe's geckos (Heteronotia binoei) in Ross River, NT, Australia

We hand-captured Heteronotia binoei near Ross River Resort, NT, Australia in 2022 and 2023 representing sexual (CA6-McD) and parthenogenetic/hybrid (3N1) forms that occur in sympatry to describe patterns between the two reproductive modes and years.Geckos were collected from six nearby locations all within 3 km of each other. They were captured at night and sampled the following day after being held in clean, dry, fabric bags. Skin bacterial samples were collected by first rinsing off transient bacteria with 75 mL high-pure water and then swabbing the entire body excluding the face and cloaca with a Copan flocked swab. Samples were stored in 300uL Zymo DNA/RNA shield on ice in the field and then frozen at -20C before extraction with the Norgen Microbiome Kit.Fastq files are from Illumina MiSeq 2x250bp paired-end sequencing of the bacterial V4 region of the 16S rRNA gene using the EMP 515F/806R primers.