Fig. 3

Schematic overview of microbiome bioinformatic analysis workflow. The hypervariable V4 region of 16S rDNA from tick samples was sequenced and split by barcode with Illumina MiSeq. Resulting paired-end reads were joined and the primer region was removed. Reads were filtered by amplicon length and aligned to SILVA as the reference database. After removal of chimeras, reads were clustered into operational taxonomic units (OTU) and taxonomically classified. Finally, an OTU-table was created and results were visualized