Scientists have discovered a new method of quantitative testing of mixed pollen ingredients

a hedgehog-free bee that was collecting pollenItalian bees with powder-footed pollen scanning electro-mirror map (magnified 600 times) Tang Yuboknown as the "pollinator professional household", in the long evolution process, obtained a perfect match with the business of professional "equipment." On the outside of some bee species, the back foot thumps are covered with thick, long, straight, stiff hairs that form a slightly recessed structure with a smooth central surface that can be used to store collected pollen balls. Entomologists refer to this structure as a "pollen basket" or "pollen basket". With this small basket, bees can be in the sea of flowers in the "supermarket" idle pace, happy collection.
scientists have long found that bees in the small basket is actually a big business: what pollen, the proportion of each kind of pollen ... Understanding these issues will not only help to understand the pollination contribution of bees, which is important for protecting plants and their pollinators, but may also help people prevent pollen allergies and even help the police solve cases. Recently, Zhou Xin' team, a professor at China Agricultural University, released a new quantitative test of mixed pollen composition, published in Molecular Ecology Resources." pollen is an extremely important event in the history of plant evolution. It's like the 'currency' circulating between flowering plants and pollinators, which buy animal pollination services by providing nutritious food. Zhou Xin, a professor at china Agricultural University and author of the paper, told China Science Daily.
insects are the most important pollinator groups. Most plants in the ecosystem can be pollinatored by a variety of insects, and the same insect also likes to visit a variety of different plants. The two-way "one-to-many" relationship between flowering plants and pollinators forms an intricate "pollination network". Studying this pollination network is of great significance to understanding the generation and evolution of biodiversity.
" species identification is the cornerstone of the pollination network, which includes the identification of a mixture of pollinator and pollen. Lang Dandan, the paper's first author and a master's student at China Agricultural University, said.
but it's not easy to identify the mixture of pollen. Pollen particles are small in size and complex in shape, which have high professional requirements for morphological classification, and it is difficult to ensure the efficiency and repeatability of identification. When classifying according to genetic information, it is found that the existing molecular taxonomic techniques can not accurately identify the diversity composition of mixed pollen, especially the true proportion of each component.
researchers decided to take a different approach. They collected a variety of pollen from the flower market and Taobao to make different proportions of artificial mixed pollen, the mixed DNA extracted from pollen directly bird gun sequencing, reducing the traditional method of PCR (polymerase chain reaction) amplification of species bias; This method can accurately and quantitatively quantify all plant species in mixed pollen and identify their relative proportions to the correct order of magnitude, even those that account for only a few thousandths of the rare pollen species.
the new hybrid pollen quantitative analysis, known as "genome scanning", required only pollen from a bee's pollen basket to perform genome screening, the researchers said. The low sample usage and the high qualitative accuracy are the significant advantages of this method.the past few decades, people have witnessed a significant decline in pollinator insects. This was followed by a sharp decline in pollination services and a decline in the production of many crops.
In 2017, a supermarket chain in Rhode Island posted two comparisons online, the former on supermarket shelves and the latter removing all products that required bee pollination to produce - and when bees stopped pollination, shelves filled with fruit and vegetables became empty.
"Without bees, we would no longer have a colorful life." The protection of pollinator insects is imminent, and the study of pollen, their main food source, is becoming more and more important. Lang Dandan said.
people who enjoy the greening of "eco-city" may find it hard to think that the sea of rotting flowers that can be seen in front of them is not necessarily the real paradise for pollinators such as bees.
people's choice of ornamental plants, usually to see the "face value." But many landscape garden plants, although they have bright and large flowers, can not produce healthy and nutritious pollen. From the pollinator's point of view, it's like walking into a "beautiful-looking" supermarket and looking closely and finding that there's nothing to eat under the gorgeous packaging.
"In order not to let pollinators such as bees 'starve to death in the supermarket', we need to analyze the insects' 'baskets' to see what they eat and how much they eat." In this way, we can provide the basis for plant selection in urban and rural planning. "At the same time, we will know who is the main pollinator for a particular crop, thus protecting agricultural production by protecting these insects.
In addition, the analysis can also reveal how much of a recipe the diet has of different pollinator insects, such as Chinese bees in China and exotic species such as Italian bees and European black bees, thus guiding the management of introduced species and the conservation of native species." quantitative detection of mixed pollen using genomic scanning technology is a ground-breaking work and a promising new approach. Luo Shixiao, deputy director of the Plant Science Center of the South China Botanical Garden of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, who was not involved in the study, said, "It provides a simple, efficient and accurate way to sample and analyze these interoperability network dynamics on a larger scale for a series of important studies -- the interoperability of plants and pollinators, the preference of important insect groups for pollen feeding, and the diversity of insects and plants at the community level." The "
the "Basket Project" launched by china at the end of the last century has solved the problem of residents' eating. Today, bees' small pollen baskets also need our attention and care. A "basket project" for hard-working pollinators such as bees requires sustained efforts by scientists.
the current work is mainly aimed at bees. Mr Luo said he expected the research to be extended to pollinators such as butterflies and ferns, which carry pollen to pollinators on organs such as nectar while smoking nectar. At the same time, he hopes this approach will make new progress in precision and in the integration of big data such as plant barcodes and stethosome genomes. (Source: Li Chenyang, China Science Journal)
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