Project description:Natural history museum specimens of historical honeybees have been successfully used to explore the genomic past of the honeybee, indicating fast and rapid changes between historical and modern specimens, possibly as a response to current challenges. In our study we explore a potential untapped archive from natural history collections - specimens of beeswax. We examine an Apis mellifera mellifera queen cell specimen from the 19th century. The intact and closed cell was analysed by X-ray Computed Tomography (CT) to reveal a perfectly preserved queen bee inside her cell. Subsequently, a micro-destructive approach was used to evaluate the possibility of protein extraction from the cell. Our results show that studies on specimens such as these provide valuable information about the past rearing of queens, their diet and development, which is relevant for understanding current honeybee behaviour. In addition we evaluate the feasibility of using historical beeswax as a biomolecular archive for ancient proteins to study honeybees.
Project description:Formalin induces inter- and intra-molecular crosslinks within exposed cells. This cross-linking can be exploited to characterise chromatin state as in the MNase (micrococcal nuclease) assays. Our team aims to optimise these assays for application in museum preserved formalin-exposed specimens. To do so, we applied an optimised MNase assay to fresh-frozen and archival eastern water dragon specimens, as old as 1905. We found that heavy formalin fixation modulates rather than eliminates signatures of differential chromatin accessibility and that these chromatin profiles are sex-specific and environmental condition dependent.
Project description:Growth assay in the presence of a toxic chemical (sr7575) that uses the barcoded collections of yeast gene deletions (haploid, diploid, DamP) to identify deletion strains that are hypersensitive to the drug.
Project description:Whales are unique museum objects that have entered collections in many ways and for different reasons. This work studies three Nordic natural history museum collections in Norway and Denmark with more than 2,500 whale specimens in total, and gathers the available biological and collection data on the specimens, which include skeletal elements, foetuses and organs preserved in ethanol or formalin, and a few dry-preserved organs. It finds that influx of specimens, which were mainly locally common species that were hunted, to the collections, mainly happened in the latest 1800s and earliest 1900s, fuelled by research trends, nation building, local whaling, and colonial mechanisms. Norway was a major whaling nation, but the largest hunt for whales in the Southern Ocean in the mid-1900s is not reflected in the Norwegian museum collections, probably because of the commercial focus of the whaling industry and logistical challenges, combined with limited research interest in zoological specimens at that time. The results demonstrate that it is important to understand these processes and the resulting biases for future research, outreach, and conservation.
Project description:Growth assay in the presence of Selenomethionine that uses the barcoded collections of yeast gene modification (deletion or DamP) to identify strains that are hypersensitive to the presence of the aminoacid.
Project description:To systematically characterize the phenotypic behavior of two 'prototrophic' version of the Yeast Knockout (YKO) gene deletion collection, we compared genome-wide finess assays across a diverse set of drug and environmental conditions. This analysis uncovered experimental liabilities in the the prototrophic collections distinct from the YKO auxotrophies that shows that auxotrophic repair (regardless of methodology) does not restore wildtype behaviour.
Project description:Growth assay in the presence of a toxic chemical that uses the barcoded collections of yeast gene deletions (haploid, diploid, DamP) to identify deletion strains that are hypersensitive to the drug.
