The tissues were frozen at -80°C. A clump (~5 mm diameter) of the frozen material was broken off and used for pyrosequencing analysis. All samples used in this study were collected under open benchtop conditions. Neither surface sterilization nor sterile dissection techniques were employed during sample preparation steps prior to DNA extractions. Pyrosequencing and analysis Bacterial tag-encoded FLX amplicon pyrosequencing (bTEFAP) was conducted as described previously [19, 20]. Our approach was modified slightly to utilize the Titanium sequencing platform rather www.selleckchem.com/products/Cediranib.html than FLX (Roche Applied Science, Indianapolis, IN) to take advantage of the longer HM781-36B clinical trial average read lengths generated by the Titanium methodology. Additionally,

we used a single 35 cycle PCR step with Qiagen HotStar Master Mix and addition of 0.5U of HotStar HiFidelity Polymerase in each reaction (Qiagen Inc., Valencia, CA). Finally, sequences used for analysis had average read length of ~450 bp with sequencing extending from the 27F 5′ GAG TTT GAT CNT GGC TCA c-Met inhibitor G 3′ to 519r 5′ GTN TTA CNG CGG CKG CTG 3′ in relation to E. coli 16S extending across V1 and into the V3 ribosomal region (Research and Testing Laboratory, Lubbock, TX). Amplicon

sequencing was performed based upon the manufacturers protocols (Roche Applied Science, Indianapolis, IN) for Titanium sequencing on FLX-titanium platform. Raw data from bTEFAP was screened and trimmed based upon quality scores of Phred20 average and binned into individual sample collections. Sequence collections were then depleted of chimeras using B2C2 [80]. The resulting files were then depleted of short reads (< 350 bp) and bacterial species identified using BlastN comparison to a quality controlled and manually curated database derived from the NCBI. Data was compiled and relative percentages of each bacterial identification were determined for each individual sample. Data was also compiled at each individual taxonomic level according to the NCBI taxonomy criteria as described previously [19, 20]. Rarefaction, Ace, and Chao 1 analyses to estimate

mathematically predicted diversity and richness in tick samples Ribociclib manufacturer was performed with DOTUR as described elsewhere [22, 81]. Acknowledgements We thank Ralph Horn and Sara Davis for technical assistance and Drs. Ludek Zurek and J. Allen Byrd for critically reviewing the manuscript prior to submission. We also acknowledge Sherri Starks for outstanding programmatic support. Mention of trade names or commercial products in this publication is solely for the purpose of providing specific information and does not imply recommendation or endorsement by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. This work was supported by USDA-ARS CRIS project number 6205-32000-031-00 D. Electronic supplementary material Additional file 1: Table S1 – Bacterial genera detected in R . ( B .) microplus. Bacterial genera detected in R. (B.) microplus samples. (PDF 120 KB) References 1.