What is it about?
Genetic information hidden in old museum specimens can deepen insights into our changing ecosystems. A large number of specimens are preserved with formalin, which has made genetic analysis very challenging. Here we present our user-friendly method of selecting optimal specimens and extracting DNA from formalin-preserved tissues, enabling broader-scale genetic analyses.
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Why is it important?
Museum specimens are an irreplaceable and finite resource for analysing our ecological past. By selecting appropriate specimens, we reduce unnecessary destructive sampling of precious specimens and empower researchers to focus their efforts on specimens with a higher chance of success. We have previously compared extraction methods and have found that hot alkaline lysis is suitable for extracting from both formalin-preserved and ethanol-preserved tissues, thus streamlining laboratory processing of samples of mixed preservation types. We also outline our read mapping approach which maximises recovery of endogenous sequence data.
Perspectives
Museum curators and wildlife geneticists alike benefit from this end-to-end protocol that starts by selecting suitable specimens and ends with recovery of high impact genomic data. As a researcher who straddles the curatorial and genetics spaces, it has been a pleasure putting forth this approach.
Erin Hahn
CSIRO
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Hot alkaline lysis gDNA extraction from formalin-fixed archival tissues, PLoS ONE, January 2024, PLOS,
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0296491.
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