Metabarcoding data (raw, processed, scripts, databases and metadata) for a potential publication under review. Tremblay.et.al.Pollen.metabarcoding

The Canadian beekeeping industry is spread across the country, with the greatest proportion of managed honeybee colonies occurring in the Prairie Provinces. Nationally, the number of beekeepers has recently been trending upwards. Simultaneously, agronomic and environmental plant pest incidents are increasing due to a number of factors, including the introduction of exotic organisms through international trade, a major pathway for the introduction of potentially invasive alien species and quarantine pests. Therefore, regulatory agencies are interested in developing high-throughput tools to achieve earlier detection of unwanted species in order to expedite application of mitigating measures to limit the impacts of their introduction. This study evaluates the potential of pollen pellet contents collected by honeybees to monitor plant pests using metabarcoding, a next-generation sequencing (NGS) approach for monitoring complex environmental samples. The study used the ITS1 intergenic region to target oomycetes and fungi, the ATP9-NAD9 spacer to specifically target Phytophthora species, and the ITS2 region to target plant species. From the NGS results, a number of plants detected corresponded to known hosts of certain pathogens or species closely-related potentially invasive plant species. Phytopathogenic genera found in the pollen samples included Fusarium spp., Gremmeniella spp., Ophiostoma spp., Peronospora spp., Phytophthora spp., and Pythium spp. Correlations between rainfall volumes, temperature, and the diversity of the fungal, plant, and oomycete communities were also established. The potential for using honeybee-collected pollen pellets to study phytopathogens in a given environment is demonstrated here, and this protocol could offer a promising complementary tool for the surveillance of phytopathogens or unwanted plants with previously described air and insect sampling methods.