Molecular Ecology Paper on Pollen Metabarcoding Now Online

Our Molecular Ecology paper focused on pollen DNA metabarcoding is now online. Led by former post-doc Dr. Karen Bell, this is the first pollen metabarcoding paper to use known, carefully constructed pollen samples to rigorously assess the qualitative and quantitative performance of DNA metabarcoding. The take-home messages are that 1) pollen metabarcoding works in terms of identifying the presence of particular taxa in a sample; but 2) that pollen metabarcoding is not quantitative, that is, read counts are not necessarily related to the proportions of pollen grains in a sample.