SRA

Honeybees face many parasites and pathogens and consequently rely on a diverse set of individual and group-level defenses to prevent disease. The crop microbiota of Apis mellifera, composed of 13 Lactic Acid Bacterial (LAB) species within the genera Lactobacillus and Bifidobacterium, are in a beneficial symbiotic relationship with each other and the honeybee to protect their niche and host. Due to increase in honeybee colony mortality, it is of importance that these honeybee specific Lactic Acid Bacterial (hbs-LAB) symbionts can be isolated, grown and correctly identified to further investigate their health promoting properties. Several previous studies have not been able to accurately identify these hbs-LAB using culture-dependent and/or molecular techniques such as 16S rRNA sequencing. Therefore we tracked the growth of the hbs-LAB individually to compare media currently use by others and us to display the requirement of supplements for an optimal growth. The results indicated that supplements such as fructose and L-cysteine are essential for optimal growth, which is the first step for a proper characterization. In addition, we demonstrate that amplicon sequencing of a region of the 16S rRNA gene using the Illumina platform and an error correcting software can identify these 13 hbs-LAB to the strain level.