DNA from Herbarium Specimens

Abstract

Old, soft tissues from plants and fungi may be derived from many sources, including fossil beds (Golenberg et al. 1990; Soltis et al. 1992) and sites of human or animal habitation (Rogers and Bendich 1985), but by far the most voluminous sources of these tissues are dried herbarium collections. Owing to the importance of herbaria, this review of methods for the analysis of DNA in preserved plants and fungi, and of methods for their preservation for future DNA extraction, will focus on herbarium specimens. Much of the literature on DNA preservation in herbarium material has been concerned with the large amounts of DNA needed for direct visualization in electrophoretic gels, or indirect visualization by hybridization to labeled probe DNA. Here, however, we will emphasize use of the polymerase chain reaction (PCR: Mullis and Faloona 1987) to amplify DNA extracted from small amounts of herbarium material, because this approach makes much more sparing use of herbarium material and because we have direct experience with PCR amplification of DNA from herbarium specimens (e.g., Bruns et al. 1990; Swann et al. 1991).