Museum specimens as windows to the past

Natural history collections offer and alternative way to study evolution over reasonably long-time scales. They provide a historical record of specimens against which modern samples can be compared offering unique resources to study evolution directly.

Humans have altered global ecosystems during the last centuries. With their temporal dimension, herbaria and their microbial communities supply the otherwise sparse long-term data necessary for monitoring ecological and evolutionary changes in the age of rapid global change. The sheer size of herbaria, combined with their increasing digitization and the ability to extract historical DNA (hDNA) from the preserved biological collections, renders them invaluable resources for understanding ecological and evolutionary species' responses to global environmental change and allows inferring these responses back in deep time. Our current research has two main directions:

  • we highlight how biological collections can inform about long-term effects on organisms and their microbial communities. We are interested in the  four of the main drivers of global change: pollution, habitat change, climate change and invasive species.
  • we interpret collection as ‘windows into the past’ to study and test key hypotheses about the evolution and dispersal of organisms using large-scale data sets obtained through high-throughput sequencing. We synthesize this information from deep time phylogenies to elucidate major evolutionary transitions.

We believe being consistent with the historical focus on the functional utility of biological collections we have an important opportunity to help ensure global food and ecosystem security by expanding research and education programs. This draws attention to the often neglected but still prominent feature of historical collections: the astonishing diversity with which museums bring together heterogeneous and idiosyncratic elements of technoscientific culture and knowledge in order to address phenomena from life sciences to societal interaction.
Publications

de Mestier A, D Mulcahy, DJ Harris, N Korotkova, S Long, E Häffner, A Paton, EK Schiller, F Leliaert, J Mackenzie-Dodds, T Fulcher, G Stahls, T von Rintelen, MP Martín, R Lücking, C Williams, CHC Lyal, A Güntsch, H Aronsson, M Castelin, A Pielach, P Poczai, Y Ruiz-León, I Sanmartin Bastida, M Thines, G Droege (2023) Policies handbook on using molecular collections. Research Ideas and Outcomes (RIO) 9:e102908

Bieker VC, Battlay P, Petersen B, Sun X, Wilson J, Brealey JC, Bretagnolle F, Nurkowski K, Lee C, Barreiro FS, Owens GL, Lee JY, Kellner FL, van Boheeman L, Gopalakrishnan S, Gaudeul M, Mueller-Schaerer H, Lommen S, Karrer G, Chauvel B, Sun Y, Kostantinovic B, Dalén L, Poczai P, Rieseberg LH, Gilbert MTP, Hodgins KA, Martin MD (2022) Uncovering the genomic bases of an extraordinary plant invasion. Science Advances 8: eabo5115

Gagnon E, Hilgenhof R, Orejuela A, McDonnell A, Sablok G, Aubriot X, Giacomin L, Gouvêa Y, Bragionis T, Stehmann JR, Bohs B, Dodsworth S, Martine C, Poczai P, Knapp S, Särkinen T (2022) Phylogenomic discordance suggests polytomies along the backbone of the large genus Solanum. American Journal of Botany 109: 580–601

Kantelinen A, Printzen C, Poczai P, Myllys L (2022) (2022) Lichen speciation is sparked by a substrate requirement shift and reproduction mode differentiation. Scientific Reports 12: 11048

Cseh A*, Poczai P*, Kiss T, Balla K, Horváth Á, Kúti Cs, Karsai I (2021) Exploring the legacy of Central European historical winter wheat landraces. Scientific Reports 11: 23915

Lehtonen S, Poczai P, Sablok G, Hyvönen J, Karger D, Flores J (2020) Exploring the phylogeny of marattialean ferns. Cladistics 36:569–593