Beebytes is very happy to have achieved its first publication, the development of a ‘HapMap’ for honey bees, in collaboration with the Roslin Institute, the University of the Basque Country in Spain, and the National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and the Environment (INRAE) in France.
Image Credit: Beebytes
The resource can be used to help identify genes associated with traits such as disease resistance and honey production, and allows researchers to evaluate breeding between different strains,and can also be used to infer missing information in data from whole-genome analyses, driving down research costs.
The research processed genetic data for over 1,300 honey bees sampled across 19 countries, including samples collected by Beebytes as part of its work analyzing the native black bee and honey bee hybridization in the UK.
It is hoped that this resource will be widely useful to the honey bee research community, and that more data will be added via the AmelHap community in due course.