Recovering the genomes hidden in museum wet collections

Abstract

Natural history museums hold vast collections of biomaterials. The collections in museums, often painstakingly sampled, are largely unexplored treasures that may help us better understand biodiversity on the planet. Museum collections can provide a unique window into the past of species long gone or currently declining due to human activity. From a molecular perspective, however, many museum samples are stored under conditions that hasten the damage of DNA, RNA and proteins. For example, samples in wet collections are those stored in liquid preservatives, typically ethanol. These ethanol-preserved tissues are often, although not always, formalin-fixed prior to storage, which may damage DNA. In this and recent issues of Molecular Ecology Resources, Straube et al (2021), O'Connell et al (2021) and Hahn et al (2022) explore different types of specimens from museum wet collections as new sources of DNA for scientific studies. All three articles found that for wet museum collections, overall specimen condition mattered most for recovering high-quality genomic DNA.