Community assembly of bat plants confirmed through pollen identification in diet of the nectar-feeding bat Glossophaga soricina, in Andean forest of Argentina

BOERO, LOURDES

Wurzburg

Simposio; Plant and Pollen Metabarcoding Workshop and Symposium; 2016

Biozentrum, Universitat Wurzburg

Bat pollination in the rain forest of northern Argentina is a virtually unknown phenomenon at the southern latitudes of these forests. I intend, as a first step, to confirm if bat pollinated plants are actually present. To achieve this goal, I collected throughout a year bat feces in the roosting sites of a nectar-feeding bat, Glossophaga soricina, which I am currently analyzing with light microscopy to identifying pollen grains. Since this approach is very time consuming, prone to misidentification, and prohibitive for large samples, is that I am strongly interested in pollen Metabarcoding with a dual-indexing approach. If this method works with bat feces, it would very significantly simplify the pollen identification and would allow to extend the study to other aspects of this study system. In this way, I expect to advance with state-of-the-art research method in the knowledge of community assembly of bat plants species, and how it changes with seasonality. If positive, it would open new possibilities for future bat pollination research that has so far been hampered by the drawbacks of the traditional techniques. This approach could be compared with another technique that has recently arisen alternative for rapid DNA identification using Ion Torrent Next Generation Sequencing.