Simultaneous isolation of Ixodidae and bacterial (Borrelia spp.) genomic DNA

Tick and tick-borne diseases have become widely distributed throughout the United States. As a result, the interest associated with tick allocation and the potential threat they may pose has increased. Efforts have expanded to understand biotic and abiotic factors which may influence tick/pathogen distribution. Thus, we have developed a procedure which allows the simultaneous isolation of both tick and bacterial DNA. Downstream applications are diverse; however, we describe the use of multiplex PCR to confirm the presence of spirochete DNA from tick samples. We suspect that this procedure is not limited to tick-bacteria systems and may be applied to a variety of arthropod-related endeavors.