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ARS Home » Pacific West Area » Wapato, Washington » Temperate Tree Fruit and Vegetable Research » Research » Publications at this Location » Publication #436912
Research Project: Integrated Approach to Manage the Pest Complex on Temperate Tree Fruits

Location: Temperate Tree Fruit and Vegetable Research

Title: Bioinformatics pipeline for insect gut content analysis

Author
item Bird, Sydney
item Cooper, William

Submitted to: Zenodo
Publication Type: Other
Publication Acceptance Date: 8/14/2026
Publication Date: 8/14/2026
Citation: Bird, S.A., Cooper, W.R. 2026. Bioinformatics pipeline for insect gut content analysis. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21936932.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21936932

Interpretive Summary:

Technical Abstract: Molecular gut content analysis is commonly used to identify the dietary history of insect herbivores and to infer the landscape-level movements to identify non-crop sources of insect pests arriving in agricultural fields or orchards. Researchers at the USDA-ARS in Wapato, WA developed a bioinformatics pipeline for demultiplexing metabarcoded reads, clustering sequences into operational taxonomic units, and identifying plant taxa from insect guts. The bioinformatics pipeline provides a rapid and simple approach for analysis of gut content data, and a consistent approach to data analysis across different studies of using this method.