Assessment of barcoding success
One of the factors determining a successful COI bacterial amplification is the initial failure of an extract to amplify mtDNA. Subsequently, to determine the likelihood of this event within taxa, we used the 55,366 specimen representative data subset to evaluate failure rates. To this end, all orders of host which gave at least one non-target Rickettsia COI hit were assessed. The barcoding success rate was determined as the proportion of specimens which matched initial morphotaxa assignment and were not removed after BOLD quality control (Ratnasingham & Hebert, 2007). As the total Rickettsia count was from a larger dataset than the one made available, an adjusted prevalence for each taxon was calculated based on the representative data subset.
Targeted and bioinformatic Rickettsia screens