Projects

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  Effects of diet and social context on honey bee queen microbiome and its mobilome

  Core Project

  Researchers study how stressors on honey bees affect mobile genetic elements and their bacterial hosts using queen monitoring cages and metagenomic sequencing techniques.

Publications

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  Caesar et al., 2025

  Caesar, L., Barksdale, C., Valiati, V. H., & Newton, I. (2025). Spatial segregation and cross-kingdom interactions drive stingless bee hive microbiome assembly. bioRxiv.

  https://doi.org/10.1101/2025.03.07.642116
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  Caesar et al., 2024

  Caesar, L., Rice, D. W., McAfee, A., Underwood, R., Ganote, C., Tarpy, D. R., Foster, L. J., & Newton, I. R. L. (2024). Metagenomic analysis of the honey bee queen microbiome reveals low bacterial diversity and Caudoviricetes phage. mSystems, 9:e01182-23.

  https://doi.org/10.1128/msystems.01182-23