Disclosing the effect of climate change on biodiversity by honey-derived environmental DNA information

Honey can be considered as an exceptional biomonitor for the study of environmental and organismal variability. During their activities, honeybees get into direct contact with the environment they live in and bring traces of it into their hives and in turn into the honey. Therefore, honeybee activities define several features of the honey they produce, making the honey a unique collector of environmental DNA (eDNA) signatures. Sequencing of honey eDNA carried out with Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) technologies can capture all biological information contained in the honey.

However, produced data results are complex and quite challenging to decode, as each piece of sequenced DNA must be reconducted to the organism that originated it in a process called DNA annotation. This is complicated by the fact that datasets are getting larger and complex as sequencing is becoming more and more cheaper. As a consequence, DNA annotation is no more feasible on small computational infrastructures. The eHoney project had to face these challenges as the availability of thousands of honey- and honeybee-derived genomic datasets required bigger computational infrastructures and the development of ad-hoc bioinformatics pipelines.