What’s in Your Plate and Where Can you Find It? The Representativity of the Diet of Plant Eating Bat Diets on Molecular Data Bases ^†

DNA barcoding makes it possible to identify trophic relationships through traces of DNA present in animal faeces, allowing a more accurate description of mutualistic interactions, such as frugivory and pollination in tropical bats. However, success in this identification depends on the representativeness of the diet of these animal species in molecular databases. Poor molecular databases make it more difficult to identify plant DNA samples at the species level. Among the 21 existing bat families, a plant-based diet has evolved in only two of these families, Phyllostomidae (Neotropical) and Pteropodidae (Paleotropical), which represent about 28% of all bat species. Despite this, it is not known how much of the plant species present in their diet have sequences of different molecular markers, such as trnH, rbcL or ITS2, described and stored in molecular data bases, such as Bold Systems, one of the main molecular data bases to store DNA barcoding sequences. Thus, our study aims to compile the available data on the diet of frugivorous and nectarivorous bats from the families Pteropodidae and Phyllostomidae, and describe which molecular markers of plant species present in their diet have sequences stored in Bold Systems. In addition, we also intend to verify the countries of origin of these samples and the main depositary institutions. Thus, our study will provide an important basis in order to support future studies about the diet of frugivorous tropical bats based on molecular data.