Inventory of ancient environmental DNA from sedimentary archives: locations, methods, and target taxa

<p>Locations of sampling sites from sedimentary ancient environmental DNA (aeDNA) studies. aeDNA is DNA that has degraded into short fragments, exhibits post-mortem damage signatures, and is recovered from a non-living tissue, organism, or environmental sample. Here we focus on sedimentary archives with contiguous records such as lake and marine sediments, permafrost, middens, cave sediments, soils, and incidental associated surface sediment samples used to interpret sedimentary archives. Studies span historic and ancient time periods using a variety of DNA-based methods (i.e., metabarcoding, shotgun sequencing, target capture, qPCR, ddPCR, and others) to study taxa from microorganisms to plants and mammals.</p>