design: Total RNA of the five Fth strains grown in triplicate in tick cells, macrophages and tick cell medium was extracted using the RNeasy Mini Kit (QIAGEN, Hilden, Germany).  After removal of rRNA with the Illumina Ribo-Zero Plus rRNA Depletion Kit (Illumina, San Diego, USA), the TruSeq Stranded mRNA Library Prep Kit (Illumina, San Diego, USA) with 1 g total RNA was used to construct sequencing libraries. The fragment size of the libraries was confirmed using the Agilent 2100 Bioanalyzer (Agilent, Santa Clara, USA). One sample (Ft10_medium_1) was excluded due to high RNA degradation. The libraries were sequenced on an Illumina NovaSeq 6000 in paired-end mode (150-bp reads).