Figure Legends
Figure 1 Experimental design . Arthropods were actively captured by citizen scientists from 20 households between August 2018 and October 2019 (1); the samples were collected monthly by researchers at Aston University, UK (2); the arthropods were taxonomically classified (3) and pools of up to 5 specimens of the same morphospecies pooled (4). From these pools endogenous and exogenous microbiota were isolated (5); aliquots of these isolates were plated on different substrates and sequenced using Sanger sequencing (6) and sequenced using DNA barcoding with the V1-V2 region of the 16S (7).
Figure 2. Arthropods relative abundance. Stacked barplot of arthropods’ relative abundance between August 2018 and October 2019. Barplots are blank when data were not collected by the citizen scientists.
Figure 3. Microbiome diversity with culture-based and metabarcoding approaches. The relative abundance of the top 10 most abundant bacterial families diversity is shown in stacked barplots for A) the culture-based and B) the metabarcoding approach. Data are shown for urban (U) and suburban (SU) households per month of sampling. Statistical analyses supporting this Figure are in Table 1.
Figure 4. Exogenous and endogenous microbiota composition.Stacked bar plots representing the microbiota composition of exogenous (exo) and endogenous (endo) bacterial communities, across the sampling months for the culture-based (A) and the metabarcoding approach (B). No culturable bacteria were isolated from the endogenous microbiota in July 2019 with the culture-based approach. Statistical analyses supporting this Figure are in Table 2.
Figure 5. Shared bacteria families . Venn diagram showing the intersection among bacteria families identified by the culture-based and the metabarcoding approach, and their overlap with the approved list of biological agents by the Advisory Committee on Dangerous Pathogens (HSE).