How sweet it is: metatranscriptomics of the bacterial community within the honey bee gut
My student, Fredrick ("Freddy") Lee, published his first research paper in Environmental Microbiology this month. Our lab's been focusing a lot recently on the honey bee microbiome and metabolic function of the community in situ . In this manuscript (titled: Saccharide breakdown and fermentation by the honey bee gut microbiome ), we explore the capabilities of the honey bee gut community using RNA sequencing. We also tested the effect of some commonly used enrichment protocols (the MICROBEnrich kit from life technologies) in the pipeline Freddy used to process the bee samples. Using three individual bees, he extracted total RNA and also used the aforementioned kit. We made 100 cycle PE libraries for an Illumina GA IIx. Here are the highlights: Major bacterial phyla and classes identified using 16s rRNA gene mining We used blast to map high quality short reads to our well known honey bee taxonomy and found that, like our previous s...