16S of turkey cecal contents or drops: UT
To test for microbiota composition of turkey cecal drops the V4 region of the 16S rRNA marker gene was amplified from DNA extracted from cecal drops that were collected off of freshly fallen snow or directly from a dissected cecum between and stored at -20C until DNA extraction. DNA extraction was performed  using a Zymo ZR-96 Fecal DNA Kit following 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.