title: 16S of mule deer feces: Monroe, UT; Cache Valley, UT
design: To test for microbiota composition of wild mule deer feces the V4 region of the 16S rRNA marker gene was amplified from DNA extracted from 60 to 80 mg of a fecal pellet  collected from a captured female mule deer between Dec 2015 and Mar 2016 and stored at -20C in a whirlpack bag. DNA was extracted from a 60 to 80 mg of a single fecal pellet, which was homogenized before the amount was transferred to tubes in the Zymo ZR-96 Fecal DNA Kit. DNA extraction procedure followed the manufacturer instructions. From these extracts, the V4 region of the 16S rRNA gene was amplified as described previously (Kozich, Westcott, Baxter, Highlander, & Schloss, 2013). Amplicons were normalized using the SequalPrep Normalization kit (Invitrogen) and sequenced via 2 x 250 Illumina v2 chemistry on a HiSeq 2500 at the BYU DNA sequencing center.