Disappearing bees, next gen sequencing and a virus

September 6, 2007

At Ignite Seattle 3, Jordan Schwartz gave a great talk on beekeeping, where he also talked about Colony Collapse Disorder, something I first heard about in a Nature podcast. Perhaps we have a clue into the disappearance.

A Bio-IT World article points to recent work by 454 Life Sciences (now a part of Roche) and scientists at Columbia University, who used a metagenomics approach using the 454 sequencing technology and found significant traces of Israeli Acute Paralysis Virus in the collapsed colonies.

Update: Jonathan Eisen knows what he’s talking about, so check out his comment below

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Comments

3 Responses to “Disappearing bees, next gen sequencing and a virus”

  1. Jonathan Eisen on September 7th, 2007 5:49 am

    Note - they did not really use metagenomics in the traditional sense. They isolated RNA from the bees and then made it into cDNA and sequences the cDNA with 454. This approach is unusual and I believe not as robust as they think it is. I cannot see how this would be useful for studying anything other than RNA viruses. So this method would miss if there was ANY association of CCD with cellular microbes or DNA viruses.

  2. Metagenomics gives clues to a three year problem affecting American bees « The Omics world on September 7th, 2007 8:22 am

    […] References: the bbgm article and the article in BioIT world . […]

  3. Sequence first ask questions later? « The Omics world on September 8th, 2007 8:24 am

    […] 8th, 2007 · No Comments I am little confused after reading about the metagenomics approach that identified the causativeagent for the colony collapse disorder which Deepak and myself blogged about. […]

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