High‐throughput monitoring of wild bee diversity and abundance via mitogenomics

We present a mitogenomics pipeline that shotgun‐sequences total DNA from bulk‐bee samples and conducts taxonomic binning against a reference library of bee mitogenomes (Fig. 1). In our study, bees were first identified morphologically, allowing us to conduct three tests. We asked (1) whether the morphological and mitogenomic data sets detected the same bee species and (2) whether read frequencies could estimate species biomass frequencies. (3) We also conducted community analyses and asked whether the two data sets clustered samples similarly and extrapolated similar estimates of overall bee diversity. We compare and contrast with the output from a metabarcoding pipeline, and finally, we discuss the relative merits of mitogenomics, metabarcoding, quantitative PCR and individual barcoding. (to see more, go to https://doi.org/10.1111/2041-210X.12416)

In this project, I was responsible for the following analysis:

● Species detection analysis of ten pooled samples

● Mitochondrial genome annotation and data submission