Vector Microbiome Project

Our research focuses on characterizing the community of bacteria inhabiting fleas that parasitize rodents. Current research focuses on the fleas infecting prairie dogs, and there are several focal bacteria of interest that are known pathogens, including Bartonella, Rickettsia, and Yersinia.

Recent discoveries

Characterizing the bacterial communities

Using environmental DNA sequencing approaches based on 16S sequences, we characterized the bacterial community for three different species of fleas.

Jones, RT, K. McCormick, and AP Martin. 2007. Bacterial communities of Bartonella-positive fleas: Diversity and community assembly patterns. Applied and Environmental Microbiology 74: 1667-1670.

We advanced this work by looking at the communities in a large number of fleas. Our results indicate that bacterial communities inhabiting disease vectors are dynamic over time: variation among communities was best explained by the timing of sampling. Additional important (and significant) effects on bacterial communities includes geographic locality of sampled prairie dogs and the species of fleas.

Jones, R. T., M. Hamady, R. Knight, and A. P. Martin. 2009. Bacterial communities of disease vectors sampled across time, space and species. ISME (accepted pending revision).