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This paper (purchase required, USD$31.50) investigates trnL (p6-loop) metabarcoding to verify the origin of honey by its floral signature.  It is a proof of concept based on analysis of 20 Turkish honey encompassing blossom and honeydew honeys purchased from local markets in a variety of local regions.

In particular, the researchers investigated the advantages of pooling samples for such “floral fingerprinting”.  They report that pooling of samples increased diversity recovery (higher richness and Shannon index) and improved the detection of both dominant and rare taxa that can be underrepresented in single samples. The individually sequenced blossom honey confirmed key label taxa, while the pool provided a landscape-level botanical profile consistent with declared compositions across products.

In this study (open access), researchers set out to discriminate Royal Gala and Golden Delicious apples as being either Czech or Polish origin.  They built a reference database of 64 samples were collected in the years 2020–2022 from Central Bohemia  Eastern Bohemia, South Moravia, Lower Silesian Voivodeship, Łódź Voivodeship, and Masovian Voivodeship.  They measured phosphorus (P), potassium (K), magnesium (Mg), calcium (Ca), boron (B), zinc (Zn), manganese (Mn), and iron (Fe) as well as isotope ratios ¹⁰B/¹¹B and  ⁸⁷Sr/⁸⁶Sr.

They concluded that, with this data set, it was not possible to robustly differentiate Czech vs Polish origin.  The variation within individual regions, and the variation due to different agricultural inputs, was too significant compared to the variation between countries.  They concluded that differentiation would be possible in principle but a much more granular reference database would be needed.  Their findings contradicted previous published work that phosphorus was a suitable marker to differentiate Czech from Polish apples.

Photo by Priscilla Du Preez 🇨🇦 on Unsplash