Mining museums for historical DNA: advances and challenges in museomics
Open accessAbstract
Historical DNA (hDNA), obtained from museum and herbarium specimens, has yielded spectacular new insights into the history of organisms. This includes documenting historical genetic erosion and extinction, discovering species new to science, resolving evolutionary relationships, investigating epigenetic effects, and determining origins of infectious diseases. However, the development of best-practices in isolating, processing, and analyzing hDNA remain under-explored, due to the substantial diversity of specimen preparation types, tissue sources, archival ages, and collecting histories. Thus, for hDNA to reach its full potential, and justify the destructive sampling of the rarest specimens, more experimental work using time-series collections, and the development of improved methods to correct for data asymmetries and biases due to DNA degradation are required.
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Newfound efficacy with the sequencing of genomes from preserved museum specimens promises to soon fill many populational gaps.
“Sampling difficulties are often exacerbated by the costs of fieldwork, specimen curation, and genome sequencing, but newfound efficacy with the sequencing of genomes from preserved museum specimens promises to soon fill many populational gaps (e.g., Card et al. 2021; Raxworthy and Smith 2021; Benham and Bowie 2023).”
From How many mammal species are there now? Updates and trends in taxonomic, nomenclatural, and geographic knowledge (2025) · cites this paper as Raxworthy and Smith 2021
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Drastic population fluctuations explain the rapid extinction of the passenger pigeon
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How genomics can help biodiversity conservation
Theissinger, K., Fernandes, C., Formenti, G., Bista, I., Berg, P. R., Bleidorn, C., Bombarely, A., Crottini, A., Gallo, G. R., Godoy, J. A., et al. (2023) · Trends in Genetics · doi:10.1016/j.tig.2023.01.005 · Cited by 401 · see citing works
Burgin, C. J., Zijlstra, J. S., Becker, M. A., Handika, H., Alston, J. M., Widness, J., Liphardt, S., Huckaby, D. G., & Upham, N. S. (2025) · Journal of Mammalogy · doi:10.1093/jmammal/gyaf047 · Cited by 28 · see citing works
High-throughput phenomics of global ant biodiversity
Katzke, J., Hita Garcia, F., Lösel, P. D., Azuma, F., Faragó, T., Aibekova, L., Casadei-Ferreira, A., Gautam, S., Richter, A., Toulkeridou, E., et al. (2026) · Nature Methods · doi:10.1038/s41592-026-03005-0 · Cited by 6 · see citing works
“To unlock this value, genetic sequencing, photography and photogrammetry are established approaches for generating digital information from standing insect collections 4–7 .”
- Authors
- Raxworthy, C. J., & Smith, B. T.
- Affiliations
- American Museum of Natural History (US)
- Corresponding author
- Raxworthy, Christopher J.
- Venue
- Trends in Ecology & Evolution
- Publisher
- Elsevier BV
- Published
- 2021-11
- Volume
- 36
- Issue
- 11
- Pages
- 1049-1060
- ISSN
- 0169-5347 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W3196442233
- Cited by
- 311
- References
- 1
- Citations by year
- 2026: 55 · 2025: 83 · 2024: 76 · 2023: 52 · 2022: 41 · 2021: 3 · 2017: 1
- FWCI
- 6.33
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- hybrid
- doi.org
- Licence
- Locations
- Trends in Ecology & Evolution (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Life Sciences › Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology › Genetics › Genetic diversity and population structure
- Physical Sciences › Environmental Science › Ecology › Environmental DNA in Biodiversity Studies
- Life Sciences › Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology › Genetics › Forensic and Genetic Research
- Keywords
- historical DNA, museomics, museum specimens, herbarium specimen, DNA degradation, species discovery, phylogenetic relationships, epigenetics, destructive sampling, specimen preparation, data bias correction
- MeSH terms
- DNA, Biological Evolution, Museums, Specimen Handling, Sequence Analysis, DNA
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