Investigating the use of pollen DNA metabarcoding to quantify bee foraging and effects of threshold selection.

ABSTRACT: DNA metabarcoding of pollen is a useful tool for studying bee foraging ecology. However, several questions about this method remain unresolved, including the extent to which sequence read data is quantitative, which type of sequence count removal threshold to use and how that choice affects our ability to detect rare flower visits, and how sequence artefacts may confound conclusions about bee foraging behavior. To address these questions, we isolated pollen from five plant species and created treatments comprised of pollen from each species alone and combinations of pollen from multiple species that varied in richness and evenness. We used ITS2 and rbcL metabarcoding to identify plant species in the samples, compared the proportion of pollen by mass to the proportion of sequencing reads fo

SUBMITTER: Arstingstall KA 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10112814 | biostudies-literature | 2023

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature