Fig. 1

Genus-level relative abundance of bacteria in I. scapularis ticks collected from Texas and Massachusetts. Field-collected male (a) and female (b) ticks from TX are compared with the males (c) and females (d) from MA, as well as the females collected from dogs (e) in TX. Each bar represents an individual whole tick (identified on the x-axis) where different colors indicate the percentage of 16S V4 rRNA gene sequences assigned to each genus (whenever possible) based on 97% identity to taxa in the Greengenes reference database. Only the top-15 dominant taxa are shown for the male ticks, while all taxa ≥1% relative abundance are shown for the females. (f = family unclassified)