Honey is a valuable food product that is often mislabeled as to its botanical composition, affecting both trade transparency and consumer safety. DNA metabarcoding is a promising method for authenticity verification, although the results are affected by the choice of molecular markers and primer pairs. This study selected 43 primer pairs from the literature covering several genes (chloroplast rbcL, matK, and trnL and nuclear ITS) and length of <600 bp. Performance of these primers was in silico assessed for all Streptophyta and a subset of them representing the honeybee foraging plants included in the European list. The results showed that rbcL primers provided the highest taxonomic coverage, which increased significantly when combined with ITS2, especially for key families, such as Asteraceae, Fabaceae, Lamiaceae, and Rosaceae. These results provide valuable insights for the design and chemical setup of molecular steps in metabarcoding experiments applied to honey authenticity also supporting the standardization of official control protocols.

中文翻译：

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蜂蜜植物来源的鉴定：DNA 宏条形码引物的计算机评估

蜂蜜是一种有价值的食品，经常因其植物成分而被贴错标签，从而影响贸易透明度和消费者安全。DNA 宏条形码是一种很有前途的真实性验证方法，尽管结果受分子标记物和引物对选择的影响。本研究从文献中选择了 43 对引物，涵盖多个基因 （叶绿体 rbcL 、 matK 和 trnL 以及核 ITS） 和长度为 <600 bp。这些引物的性能对所有链霉菌门及其子集代表欧洲清单中包含的蜜蜂觅食植物进行了计算机评估。结果表明，rbcL 引物提供了最高的分类覆盖率，与 ITS2 结合时显着增加，尤其是对于关键科，如菊科、豆科、唇形科和蔷薇科。这些结果为应用于蜂蜜真实性的元条形码实验中分子步骤的设计和化学设置提供了有价值的见解，也支持官方控制方案的标准化。