In this issue, Soniat et al. (2021) explore aspects of degradation of DNA in frozen tissue samples stored at −80°C. Diverse materials held in natural history collections have long provided essential insights into mammalian systematics, biogeography, ecology, and evolution. More recently, frozen tissue samples have become critical elements of the biodiversity infrastructure and have contributed extensively to applied issues of societal concern in public health, environmental contaminants, invasive species, food security, habitat loss, and climate change (Pyke and Ehrlich 2010; Funk 2018). For example, significant contributions to understanding various mammal-borne emerging infectious diseases over the last century (Thompson et al. 2021 and references therein) have highlighted the potential of these collections to rapidly identify novel zoonotic pathogens, their host associations, and geographic distributions, and also provide a foundation for monitoring and predicting renewed emergence. Because the past 40 years saw the rapid integration of molecular genetics into mammalogy, including the newly developing -omics technologies (e.g., whole-genome sequencing, transcriptomics, exomics, metagenomics, viromics) that now reveal genome level discoveries (Soniat et al. 2021), natural history collections began diversifying their holdings in the 1970s to match the growing demands for frozen tissue samples. Today, more than 800,000 individual mammalian specimens (Dunnum et al. 2018 plus estimated growth since 2017) are represented by multiple tissues, most commonly cardiac or skeletal muscle, liver, kidney, spleen, and blood.

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编辑的选择

在这个问题上，Soniat 等人。(2021) 探讨了储存在 -80°C 的冷冻组织样本中 DNA 降解的各个方面。长期以来，自然历史收藏中的各种材料为哺乳动物系统学、生物地理学、生态学和进化提供了重要的见解。最近，冷冻组织样本已成为生物多样性基础设施的关键要素，并为公共健康、环境污染物、入侵物种、粮食安全、栖息地丧失和气候变化等社会关注的应用问题做出了广泛贡献（Pyke 和 Ehrlich 2010；Funk 2018）。例如，上个世纪对了解各种哺乳动物传播的新兴传染病做出了重大贡献（Thompson 等人，2017 年）。2021 及其中的参考文献）强调了这些集合在快速识别新型人畜共患病病原体、它们的宿主关联和地理分布方面的潜力，并为监测和预测重新出现提供了基础。因为在过去的 40 年里，分子遗传学迅速融入了哺乳动物学，包括新开发的组学技术（例如全基因组测序、转录组学、外显子组学、宏基因组学、病毒组学），这些技术现在揭示了基因组水平的发现（Soniat 等人，2021 )，自然历史收藏在 1970 年代开始多样化其藏品，以满足对冷冻组织样本不断增长的需求。今天，超过 800,000 个哺乳动物个体标本（Dunnum et al. 2018 加上自 2017 年以来的估计增长）由多种组织代表，