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

While classical palynology has been the method of choice to assess botanical diversity of bee-collected pollen for multiple purposes, DNA metabarcoding is emerging as a powerful alternative being able to achieve high taxonomic identification accuracy. Moreover,DNA metabarcoding allows 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 at the forefront of the pipeline. Hence, it is important to test how sample preservation influences quality and quantitative performance of pollen metabarcoding. While inmetabarcoding studies pollen has typically been preserved at −20°C (FRZ), this is not the best method to be applied by citizen scientists.

Keywords

Pollen DNA metabarcoding Preservation bias Citizen science

URI

http://hdl.handle.net/10198/28342

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