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

1. Bee populations and other pollinators face multiple, synergistically acting threats, which have led to population declines, loss of local species richness and pollination services, and extinctions. However, our understanding of the degree, distribution and causes of declines is patchy, in part due to inadequate monitoring systems, with the challenge of taxonomic identification posing a major logistical barrier. Pollinator conservation would benefit from a high-throughput identification pipeline. 2. We show that the metagenomic mining and resequencing of mitochondrial genomes (mitogenomics) can be applied successfully to bulk samples of wild bees. We assembled the mitogenomes of 48 UK bee species and then shotgun-sequenced total DNA extracted from 204 whole bees that had been collected in 10 pan-trap samples from farms in England and been identified morphologically to 33 species. Each sample data set was mapped against the 48 reference mitogenomes. 3. The morphological and mitogenomic...1. 蜜蜂种群及其他传粉者（pollinators）面临多种协同作用的威胁，此类威胁已导致种群数量衰减、本地物种丰富度丧失、传粉服务受损乃至物种灭绝。当前学界对种群衰减的程度、分布范围与成因的认知较为零散，这在一定程度上源于监测体系不完善，而分类鉴定难题更是一道主要实操壁垒。传粉者保护工作亟需一套高通量鉴定流程（high-throughput identification pipeline）。 2. 本研究证实，线粒体基因组学（mitogenomics）领域的线粒体基因组宏基因组挖掘与重测序技术，可成功应用于野生蜜蜂的批量样本。我们组装了48种英国蜜蜂的线粒体基因组，随后对204只整只蜜蜂的总DNA进行鸟枪法测序（shotgun-sequenced）：这些样本采自英格兰农场的10组色盘诱捕器（pan-trap）样本，经形态学鉴定隶属于33个物种。将每个样本的测序数据与48个参考线粒体基因组进行比对。 3. 形态学与线粒体基因组学……