Procambarus clarkii  16S RNA carapace microbiota
Carapace bacterial samples were taken using sterile swabs (Medical Wire & Equipment, UK). Gut samples were separated and removed. Swabs and tissues were kept at -80C until processing. DNA was extracted using the PowerSoil DNA Isolation Kit (QIAGEN, Netherlands), DNA concentration and quality were measured in a NanoDropTM 2000 Spectrophotometer (ThermoFisher Scientific, USA). DNA extractions were shipped on dry ice to the University of Michigan Medical School (USA) for amplification and sequencing according to the protocol of Kozich et al. (2013). Each sample was amplified for the V4 hyper-variable region of the 16S rRNA gene (~250 bp). All amplicon libraries were pooled and sequenced in a single run of the Illumina MiSeq sequencing platform.