The dataset of 16S rDNA and values of viral loads were obtained from a previously published study whose aim was to investigate the possible contribution of the microbiota composition to the natural varroa resistance of the Gotland honeybee population (Thaduri et al. 2021)
The whole sequence data, which included multiple (V2, V3, V4, V6-7, V8, and V9) short-read amplicons sequences, were combined in the reconstruction of a near full-length 16S marker gene using via Short MUltiple Reads Framework (SMURF) algorithm, which allows increasing the taxonomic resolution and reducing the effect of PCR biases, for a coherent community profiling (Fuks et al., 2018). All the sequence processing was performed on the QIIME 2 environment (Bolyen et al., 2019). The SMURF method was used as implemented QIIME 2 plugin q2-sidle (Debelius et al., 2021). For this purpose, the raw sequences were split by hypervariable regions according to the primer set used for targeted sequencing, and by using the q2-cutadapt plugin. Only the forward sequences were used since there was a total overlap of forward and reverse sequences for each targeted amplicon region.