Nondestructive DNA extraction method for mitochondrial DNA analyses of museum specimens

Museum specimens have provided the material for a large proportion of ancient DNA studies conducted during the last 20 years. However a major drawback of the genetic analyses is that the specimens investigated art usually damaged, as parts of skin, bone, or a tooth have to be removed for DNA extraction. To get around these limitations, we have developed a non-destructive extraction method for bone, tooth, and skin samples. We, found that it is possible to amplify mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) sequences lip to at least 414 bp long,from samples up to 164 years old. Using this method, almost 90% (35 of 40) of the investigated samples yielded amplifiable mtDNA. Moreover, we found that repeated extractions of the same samples allowed amplifications of the expected length,for all samples at least three times and for some samples lip to at least five times. Thus this method opens up the possibility to repeatedly use museum collections,for mtDNA analyses without damaging the specimens and thus without reducing the value of irreplaceable collections for morphological analyses.