Journal
MOLECULAR ECOLOGY RESOURCES
Volume 10, Issue 6, Pages 1009-1018Publisher
WILEY
DOI: 10.1111/j.1755-0998.2010.02855.x
Keywords
ancient DNA; Arctic Flora; chloroplast; climate change; DNA barcoding sensu lato; environmental sample
Funding
- European Commission [GOCE-2006-036866]
Ask authors/readers for more resources
Palaeoenvironments and former climates are typically inferred from pollen and macrofossil records. This approach is time-consuming and suffers from low taxonomic resolution and biased taxon sampling. Here, we test an alternative DNA-based approach utilizing the P6 loop in the chloroplast trnL (UAA) intron; a short (13-158 bp) and variable region with highly conserved flanking sequences. For taxonomic reference, a whole trnL intron sequence database was constructed from recently collected material of 842 species, representing all widespread and/or ecologically important taxa of the species-poor arctic flora. The P6 loop alone allowed identification of all families, most genera (> 75%) and one-third of the species, thus providing much higher taxonomic resolution than pollen records. The suitability of the P6 loop for analysis of samples containing degraded ancient DNA from a mixture of species is demonstrated by high-throughput parallel pyrosequencing of permafrost-preserved DNA and reconstruction of two plant communities from the last glacial period. Our approach opens new possibilities for DNA-based assessment of ancient as well as modern biodiversity of many groups of organisms using environmental samples.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available