Ancient <scp>DNA</scp> sheds new light on the Svalbard foraminiferal fossil record of the last millennium

• Published in: Geobiology
• Main Authors: Pawłowska, J., Lejzerowicz, F., Esling, P., Szczuciński, W., Zajączkowski, M., Pawlowski, J.
• Other Authors: Swiss National Science Foundation, Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education, Scientific Exchange Programme between Switzerland and the New Member States of the EU (Sciex-NMS)
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Wiley 2014
• Subjects: General Earth and Planetary Sciences; General Environmental Science; Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics; Hornsund; Svalbard
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/gbi.12087; https://api.wiley.com/onlinelibrary/tdm/v1/articles/10.1111%2Fgbi.12087; https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/gbi.12087

Abstract Recent palaeogenetic studies have demonstrated the occurrence of preserved ancient DNA ( aDNA ) in various types of fossilised material. Environmental aDNA sequences assigned to modern species have been recovered from marine sediments dating to the Pleistocene. However, the match between the aDNA and the fossil record still needs to be evaluated for the environmental DNA approaches to be fully exploited. Here, we focus on foraminifera in sediments up to one thousand years old retrieved from the Hornsund fjord (Svalbard). We compared the diversity of foraminiferal microfossil assemblages with the diversity of aDNA sequenced from subsurface sediment samples using both cloning and high‐throughput sequencing (HTS). Our study shows that 57% of the species archived in the fossil record were also detected in the aDNA data. However, the relative abundance of aDNA sequence reads and fossil specimens differed considerably. We also found a limited match between the stratigraphic occurrence of some fossil species and their aDNA sequences, especially in the case of rare taxa. The aDNA data comprised a high proportion of non‐fossilised monothalamous species, which are known to dominate in modern foraminiferal communities of the Svalbard region. Our results confirm the relevance of HTS for studying past micro‐eukaryotic diversity and provide insight into its ability to reflect fossil assemblages. Palaeogenetic studies including aDNA analyses of non‐fossilised groups expand the range of palaeoceanographical proxies and therefore may increase the accuracy of palaeoenvironmental reconstructions.