Genetic analysis of microbiota and mycobiota associated with Ixodes scapularis ticks collected from Wisconsin in 2022

This metadata presents a dataset of bacterial (microbiota), and fungal (mycobiota) communities associated with Ixodes scapularis ticks collected from hunter-harvested white-tailed deer during the 2022 fall hunting season in Wisconsin. Deer were hunted across eleven counties in Wisconsin. Engorged ticks were collected from deer at the deer-weighing station in Fort McCoy in Monroe County, Wisconsin. Nucleic acid was extracted from individual ticks and used for high-throughput sequencing of the 16S rRNA gene and ITS2 region to characterize bacterial and fungal diversity, respectively. This dataset provides raw sequence reads associated with the individual tick samples to facilitate the study of tick microbial dynamics in response to natural infection.