COI Metabarcoding as a Novel Approach for Assessing the Honey Bee Source of European Honey.

ABSTRACT: Honey is a widely consumed food product frequently subjected to adulteration, with the mislabeling of its botanical or geographical origin being one of the most common practices. Determining the entomological origin of honey is particularly challenging but of high relevance for ensuring its authenticity, especially for products with protected designation of origin (PDO) labels. This study presents a novel DNA metabarcoding approach targeting a highly informative 406 bp fragment of the cytochrome c oxidase I (COI) gene to differentiate among the three major mitochondrial lineages (A, M, and C) of honey bees (Apis mellifera L.) native to Europe. The target region was selected based on the calculated fixation index (F_ST), which is frequently used in Population Genetics as a

SUBMITTER: Honrado M 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11816727 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature