The microbial community of mule deer lymph nodes Detection of protein-coding and ribosomal RNA transcripts provides strong support for the presence of viable and replicating microorganisms. Therefore, we enriched the total RNA obtained from lymph nodes for poly(A) + RNA to prepare cDNA libraries and subjected them to pyrosequencing on a Roche GS FLX sequencer (Roche-454 Life Sciences). Properties of sequencing runs are given in Table S1 . All reads were compared against the nonredundant NCBI protein database. The composite metatranscriptomic species profile for five individual and two pools of 4 or 8 mule deer samples, determined using the software MEGAN [32] , is depicted in Fig. 1A .