Xylocopa
The study of the carpenter bee (Xylocopa violacea), forms part of the ERGA pilot project initiative, where reference genomes of European species including species of agricultural importance such as pollinators, are being generated and studied. Pollinators play an important ecological role and thus ongoing environmental changes request the need for their urgent conservation, which in turn demands deep knowledge of the genetic information and diversity both at species and population level. Consequently, a collaborative and coordinated effort to generate the complete reference genome of the carpenter bee would be able to give conservation biologists a wider picture of this species' adaptive traits and allow us to compare them to those of other available reference genomes of closely related taxa. The application of these genomic results focus on preservation of the species and ecosystems that depend on them.