Collaborative environmental DNA sampling from petal surfaces of flowering cherry Cerasus × yedoensis ‘Somei-yoshino’ across the Japanese archipelago

Cerasus × yedoensis ‘Somei-yoshino’ is a common cherry blossoms tree in Japan. The wide-spread clone of the single species across the country provides excellent opportunities to investigate the composition of microbiome and its interaction with its surronding environment. As a pilot project of such an analysis, we collected 577 environmental DNA samples via crowd sourcing among participants of a scientific conference, and characterized the composition of microbial species on petal surfaces.

日本語による解説記事（国立遺伝学研究所）