Museum specimens held in natural history collections around the world represent a wealth of underutilized genetic information due to the poor state of preservation of the DNA, which often makes it difficult to sequence. An international team, including Nadir Alvarez from the GenEv department and the Museum of Natural History of the City of Geneva, has optimized a method developed for analyzing ancient DNA to identify the relationships between species on a deep evolutionary scale.

The article was published in the journal Genome Biology and Evolution.

Check out the UNIGE press release.