Honey bee collected pollen for botanical identification via its2 metabarcoding: a comparison of preservation methods for citizen science

DNA metabarcoding is emerging as a powerful method for botanical identification of bee-collected pollen, allowing analysis of hundreds of samples in a single high-throughput sequencing run, therefore offering unprecedented scale in citizen science projects. Biases in metabarcoding can be introduced at any stage of sample processing and preservation is the first step of the pipeline. Hence, it is important to test whether the pollen preservation method influences metabarcoding performance. While in metabarcoding studies pollen has typically been preserved at −20°C, this is not the best method to be applied by citizen scientists. Here, we compared the freezing method (FRZ) with ethanol (EtOH), silica gel (SG) and room temperature (RT) in 87 pollen samples collected from hives in Austria and Denmark.

Keywords

Pollen DNA metabarcoding Preservation bias Citizen science

URI

http://hdl.handle.net/10198/28381

Citation

Quaresma, Andreia; Brodschneider, Robert; Gratzer, Kristina; Gray, Alison; Keller, Alexander; Kilpinen, Ole; Rufino, José; Van der Steen, Jozef; Vejsnaes, Flemming; Pinto, M. Alice (2022). Honey bee collected pollen for botanical identification via its2 metabarcoding: a comparison of preservation methods for citizen science. In EurBee 9 - 9th European Congress of Apidology. Belgrade