Data From: Bacterial Communities of House Flies from Dairy Farms Highlight Their Role as Reservoirs, Disseminators and Sentinels of Microbial Threats to Human and Animal Health

Adult house flies (Musca domestica L.) inhabiting dairy farms not only are nuisance pests but also harbor and disseminate bacteria. We examined the bacterial community composition, diversity, environmental sources, and prevalence in individual adult female house flies and cattle manure samples collected monthly from Florida, North Carolina, and Tennessee dairy farms between May and August 2021. Individual house flies carried diverse bacterial communities, encompassing all bacterial taxa (100%) identified in across manure samples, and additional species likely acquired from the animals. Bacterial community assemblage in house flies and manure samples within farms varied by month. Some taxa were differentially associated with either house flies (Corynebacterium, Acinetobacter, and Staphylococcus) or manure samples (Treponema, Succinivibrio, and Clostridia). House fly bacterial communities mostly contained specialist species originating from manure, with several taxa (Escherichia, Corynebacterium, Turicibacter) being potential pathogens of livestock and humans. These findings further support the role of house flies as carriers of cattle-associated bacteria, including pathogens, and their potential for disseminating these microbes among cattle and to neighboring environments. Since their bacterial communities provide a snapshot of their surrounding environment, house flies also serve as effective sentinels in xenosurveillance strategies.

The raw Illumina MiSeq sequence data for this project can be found here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/bioproject/?term=PRJNA1070634

Resources in this dataset:

• Resource: Metadata for bacterial communities in house fly and manure samples from dairy farm;
• File Name: Metadata_dairy_farm_associated_house_fly_n_manure_microbiome.xlsx Resource;
• Description: This spreadsheet links the raw sequence reads on NCBI Accession No. PRJNA1070634 data.