Metatranscriptome analysis of sympatric bee species identifies variants of bee infecting viruses, and a novel RNA virus primarily associated with Andrena

Metatranscriptome analysis of sympatric bee species identifies variants of bee infecting viruses, and a novel RNA virus primarily associated with Andrena.Samples of Apis mellifera and Andrena were each collected from 4 different co-localized sites differing in floral and forager diversity.Illumina sequencing was performed on RNA depleted total RNA libraries from pools of either virus augmented (3 samples) or non-augmented (8 samples).Sequence was filtered to remove reads aligning to Apis mellifera and previously identified non-viral sequence of the honey bee holobiome.Sequence remaining after filtering was assembled into metatranscriptomes using Trinity.