Pollen metabarcoding is emerging as a powerful tool for ecological research and offers unprecedented scale in citizen science projects for environmental monitoring via honey bees. Biases in metabarcoding can be…
Continue readingCategory: Tools

An integrative environmental pollen diversity assessment and its importance for the Sustainable Development Goals
Pollen is at once intimately part of the reproductive cycle of seed plants and simultaneously highly relevant for the environment (pollinators, vector for nutrients, or organisms), people (food safety and…
Continue reading
Standard methods for pollen research
“Bee pollen” is pollen collected from flowers by honey bees. It is used by the bees to nourish themselves, mainly by providing royal jelly and brood food, but it is…
Continue reading
Inferring Core Genome Phylogenies for Bacteria
Due to the increasing availability of public bacterial genome data and cost efficiency of novel bacterial strain sequencing, phylogenetic analyses based on more than a single or few marker genes…
Continue reading
Open Science principles for accelerating trait-based science across the Tree of Life
Synthesizing trait observations and knowledge across the Tree of Life remains a grand challenge for biodiversity science. Species traits are widely used in ecological and evolutionary science, and new data…
Continue reading
CRISPR/Cas 9-Mediated Mutations as a New Tool for Studying Taste in Honeybees
Honeybees rely on nectar as their main source of carbohydrates. Sucrose, glucose, and fructose are the main components of plant nectars. Intriguingly, honeybees express only 3 putative sugar receptors (AmGr1,…
Continue reading
FENNEC: Functional Exploration of Natural Networks and Ecological Communities
Assessment of species composition in ecological communities and networks is an important aspect of biodiversity research. Yet, for many ecological questions the ecological properties (traits) of organisms in a community…
Continue readingmeta-barcoding marker demultiplexing
A single script! What it does: demultiplexing of metabarcoding data which consists of multiple markers. Data must have followed a library preparation/sequencing strategy which includes sequencing of the forward primers….
Continue reading
AliTV – Alignment Toolbox and Visualization
The comparison of genome structures of organisms can yield interesting insights into evolutionary processes. In order to do the comparison, whole genome alignments are required. However, the interpretation of whole…
Continue readingallocation2samplesheet for Illumina MiSeq
A helper script to transform a sample allocation sheet into a samplesheet that can be imported into the Illumina MiSeq for multiplexed sequencing. This repo contains a single script which is…
Continue reading