Figure 2.

Higher rank taxonomy of the microbiome of blowflies and houseflies. (A) Super kingdom classification of the metagenomic reads, indicating bacteria are the main component of the microbiome of fly mechanical vectors. Reads assigned to Eukaryota are mostly assigned to insects (Diptera, in particular. See Supplementary Figure S1 for detailed analysis of the eukaryote reads). The sample marked with an * shows a high virus load that was identified as the MdSGHV DNA virus that infects houseflies. The genome mapping of viral reads against the MdSGHV reference genome showed that the metagenomic dataset was spread across the viral genome with >12,000-fold coverage on average. (B) Bacterial counterpart of the metagenomic reads at phylum-level taxonomic rank. Proteobacteria dominates the microbiome of blowflies and houseflies, followed by Bacteroidetes and Firmicutes. Most of the proteobacterial reads are assigned to the endosymbiont Wolbachia sp. in blowflies and to Psychrobacter sp. PRwf-1 in houseflies. Detailed results also show the presence of the Wolbachia endosymbiont in housefly samples collected in three different countries. Sample marked with “C” indicates the lab-reared pool sample serving as a control.