Transcript-based assessment of bee pathogens

The project involves the collection of adult bees from healthy and 'collapsed' colonies from various geographic areas for a transcript-based assessment of bee pathogens that may be involved in colony collapse. cDNA prepared from pooled samples of each type (healthy or collapsed) was sequenced with an Illumina Genome Analyzer. Contigs were assembled with Velvet to identify known and novel pathogens, e.g. viruses and microsporidia, and mapped reads were used to estimate the abundance of these pathogens in each sequence pool.