This affected both relatively large and highly abundant species such as the Caspian bivalves Dreissena caspia and D. 55–99 endemic species (see Wesselingh et al., 2019 Gogaladze et al., 2021) declined in abundance or completely vanished in the course of human activities in the last century, and have been replaced by invasive species. It has suffered from major anthropogenic disturbances since the mid-twentieth century and is facing a severe biodiversity crisis ( Wesselingh et al., 2019). This is of particular importance when the taxon of interest has gone extinct in the wild and/or its habitat is no longer accessible.Ī prime example is the endemic Pontocaspian molluscan fauna that evolved in the Caspian Sea, the Black Sea, and the Aral Sea region. However, even small amounts of genetic (and genomic) information can still be valuable when placing individual species in a phylogenetic context (e.g., Guschanski et al., 2013 Fabre et al., 2014). Moreover, the corresponding DNA sequences may contain a high number of read errors, which usually makes population-level analyses infeasible. DNA from museum materials is often highly degraded (i.e., represented as ultrashort fragments) and sometimes cross-linked with proteins or other DNA fragments and thus difficult to access (see e.g., Card et al., 2021 Orlando et al., 2021 Raxworthy and Smith, 2021). In recent years, advances in molecular technology have enabled access to valuable genetic and genomic resources from both comparatively old ethanol- and formalin-fixed or dry materials ( Bi et al., 2013 Hykin et al., 2015 Ruane and Austin, 2017 Derkarabetian et al., 2019 Kehlmaier et al., 2020 Card et al., 2021 Ernst et al., 2021 Orlando et al., 2021 Raxworthy and Smith, 2021). Nevertheless, our results show that hDNA may in principle yield high-quality sequences for species-level phylogenetic analyses, which underlines the importance of museum collections as valuable archives of the biological past.īiological collections in museums represent archives of the recent and remote past, providing a variety of metadata that allow to address a wide range of research questions (e.g., Bakker et al., 2020 Miralles et al., 2020). conus, likely due to a high degree of tissue digestion and contamination with non-gastropod DNA. In contrast, no informative gastropod-specific DNA was obtained for L. Assessment of both sequencing depth (mean coverage) and proportion of ambiguous sites suggests that our assembled consensus sequences are reliable for this species. Our study resulted in the first phylogenetically informative mitochondrial and nuclear markers for L. We therefore studied two probably extinct gastropod species of the genus Laevicaspia, which were collected ∼140 years ago in the Caspian Sea, to map “standard” mitochondrial and nuclear markers and assess both the sequencing depth and the proportion of ambiguous sites as an indicator for the phylogenetic quality of the NGS data.

However, hDNA from museum collections is often highly degraded, making it difficult to assess relationships at or above the species level. With current sequencing technologies, it is possible to obtain historical DNA (hDNA) from older material and/or endangered species to answer taxonomic, systematic, and biogeographical questions. Museum material is an important source of metadata for past and recent biological events. 2Museum of Zoology, Senckenberg Natural History Collections Dresden, Dresden, Germany.1Department of Animal Ecology and Systematics, Justus Liebig University Giessen, Giessen, Germany.Catharina Clewing 1*‡, Christian Kehlmaier 2‡, Björn Stelbrink 1†, Christian Albrecht 1 and Thomas Wilke 1

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