Mining museums for historical DNA: advances and challenges in museomics

CJ Raxworthy, BT Smith - Trends in Ecology & Evolution, 2021 - cell.com
Historical DNA (hDNA), obtained from museum and herbarium specimens, has yielded
spectacular new insights into the history of organisms. This includes documenting historical …

Natural history collections as windows on evolutionary processes

MW Holmes, TT Hammond, GOU Wogan… - Molecular …, 2016 - Wiley Online Library
Natural history collections provide an immense record of biodiversity on Earth. These
repositories have traditionally been used to address fundamental questions in …

The utility of single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) data in phylogenetics

AD Leaché, JR Oaks - Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution …, 2017 - annualreviews.org
Resolving the genealogy of life—the phylogenetic relationships that describe the
evolutionary history of species—remains one of the great challenges of systematic biology …

Phylogenomics using formalin‐fixed and 100+ year‐old intractable natural history specimens

S Ruane, CC Austin - Molecular ecology resources, 2017 - Wiley Online Library
Museum specimens provide a wealth of information to biologists, but obtaining genetic data
from formalin‐fixed and fluid‐preserved specimens remains challenging. While DNA …

Sequence capture phylogenomics of historical ethanol‐preserved museum specimens: Unlocking the rest of the vault

S Derkarabetian, LR Benavides… - Molecular ecology …, 2019 - Wiley Online Library
Natural history collections play a crucial role in biodiversity research, and museum
specimens are increasingly being incorporated into modern genetics‐based studies …

Museum specimens of terrestrial vertebrates are sensitive indicators of environmental change in the Anthropocene

CJ Schmitt, JA Cook, KR Zamudio… - … Transactions of the …, 2019 - royalsocietypublishing.org
Natural history museums and the specimen collections they curate are vital scientific
infrastructure, a fact as true today as it was when biologists began collecting and preserving …

Candidate‐species delimitation in Desmognathus salamanders reveals gene flow across lineage boundaries, confounding phylogenetic estimation and clarifying …

RA Pyron, KA O'Connell, EM Lemmon… - Ecology and …, 2022 - Wiley Online Library
Abstract Dusky Salamanders (genus Desmognathus) currently comprise only 22 described,
extant species. However, recent mitochondrial and nuclear estimates indicate the presence …

Successful application of ancient DNA extraction and library construction protocols to museum wet collection specimens

N Straube, ML Lyra, JLA Paijmans… - Molecular Ecology …, 2021 - Wiley Online Library
Millions of scientific specimens are housed in museum collections, a large part of which are
fluid preserved. The use of formaldehyde as fixative and subsequent storage in ethanol is …

Embracing heterogeneity: coalescing the Tree of Life and the future of phylogenomics

GA Bravo, A Antonelli, CD Bacon, K Bartoszek… - PeerJ, 2019 - peerj.com
ABSTRACT Building the Tree of Life (ToL) is a major challenge of modern biology, requiring
advances in cyberinfrastructure, data collection, theory, and more. Here, we argue that …

Century-old chromatin architecture revealed in formalin-fixed vertebrates

EE Hahn, J Stiller, MR Alexander, A Grealy… - Nature …, 2024 - nature.com
Gene expression is regulated by changes in chromatin architecture intrinsic to cellular
differentiation and as an active response to environmental stimuli. Chromatin dynamics are …