Museomics highlights the importance of scientific museum collections

Natural history museums have played a fundamental role in preserving scientific memory. However, many of these museums' scientific collections have remained underutilized in recent decades.

The emergence of sequencing techniques that require recent tissues and intact DNA has made historical collections irrelevant. But this scenario is changing, driven primarily by museomics.

Museomics can be defined as the application of molecular biology, genomics, and bioinformatics techniques to the study of specimens preserved in museum collections, involving the extraction, sequencing, and analysis of degraded DNA from historical samples [hDNA] from museums, enabling investigations into evolution, biodiversity, population genetics, phylogeny, taxonomy, and conservation," said Taran Grant, who is a full professor – at the Department of Zoology at the Institute of Biosciences and an associate curator of amphibians at the Museum of Zoology, both at the University of S?o Paulo (USP).

Technological advances, particularly with the Illumina platform and other next-generation sequencing technologies, have made it possible to work with fragmented or degraded DNA, favoring the use of museum material.

However, a new challenge has emerged: the amount of endogenous DNAthat is, authentic DNA from the organism – in tissue samples is extremely small. This makes the samples highly susceptible to contamination from environmental DNA or from handling.

Therefore, controlled environments, such as clean room laboratories with sterile conditions, are required for the extraction and analysis of this material to prevent contamination and loss of original genetic information.

Image source: Daderot, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.