The bacterial community of the lone star tick (Amblyomma americanum)

Background: The lone star tick (Amblyomma americanum), an important vector of a wide range of human and animal pathogens, is very common throughout the East and Midwest of the USA. Ticks are known to carry non-pathogenic bacteria that may play a role in their vector competence for pathogens. Several previous studies using the high throughput sequencing (HTS) technologies reported the commensal bacteria in a tick midgut as abundant and diverse. In contrast, in our preliminary survey of the field collected adult lone star ticks, we found the number of culturable/viable bacteria very low. Methods: We aimed to analyze the bacterial community of A. americanum by a parallel culture-dependent and a culture-independent approach applied to individual ticks. Results: We analyzed 94 adult females collected in eastern Kansas and found that 60.8% of ticks had no culturable bacteria and the remaining ticks carried only 67.7 +/- 42.8 colony-forming units (CFUs)/tick representing 26 genera. HTS of the 16S rRNA gene resulted in a total of 32 operational taxonomic units (OTUs) with the dominant endosymbiotic genera Coxiella and Rickettsia (> 95%). Remaining OTUs with very low abundance were typical soil bacterial taxa indicating their environmental origin. Conclusions: No correlation was found between the CFU abundance and the relative abundance from the culture-independent approach. This suggests that many culturable taxa detected by HTS but not by culture-dependent method were not viable or were not in their culturable state. Overall, our HTS results show that the midgut bacterial community of A. americanum is very poor without a core microbiome and the majority of bacteria are endosymbiotic.

Automated summary

The study analyzed the bacterial community of adult A. americanum ticks collected in eastern Kansas. The majority of ticks had no culturable bacteria, and those with culturable bacteria mainly carried endosymbiotic genera such as Coxiella and Rickettsia. High throughput sequencing revealed a poor midgut bacterial community in A. americanum ticks, dominated by endosymbiotic bacteria.