ArticlePhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2015
Proxy comparison in ancient peat sediments: pollen, macrofossil and plant DNA.
Article in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 15 papers.
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15 citing papers in PubMed.
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- Sedimentary ancient DNA as part of a multimethod paleoparasitology approach reveals temporal trends in human parasitic burden in the Roman period.PLoS neglected tropical diseases · 2025Article
- A Quaternary Sedimentary Ancient DNA (Microorganisms · 2025Article
- Wild and domesticated animal abundance is associated with greater late-Holocene alpine plant diversity.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Using ancient sedimentary DNA to forecast ecosystem trajectories under climate change.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Article
- High resolution ancient sedimentary DNA shows that alpine plant diversity is associated with human land use and climate change.Nature communications · 2022Article
- Holocene chloroplast genetic variation of shrubs (Ecology and evolution · 2021Article
- Integrative analysis of DNA, macroscopic remains and stable isotopes of dog coprolites to reconstruct community diet.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- Investigating variability in microbial community composition in replicate environmental DNA samples down lake sediment cores.PloS one · 2021Article
- Plant DNA metabarcoding of lake sediments: How does it represent the contemporary vegetation.PloS one · 2018Article
- Article
- Microbial survival strategies in ancient permafrost: insights from metagenomics.The ISME journal · 2017Article
- Lake sedimentary DNA accurately records 20The New phytologist · 2017Article
- First physical evidence for forested environment in the Arctic during MIS 3.Scientific reports · 2016Article
- Introduction. Ancient DNA: the first three decades.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2015Article
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9 authors.
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Abstract
We compared DNA, pollen and macrofossil data obtained from Weichselian interstadial (age more than 40 kyr) and Holocene (maximum age 8400 cal yr BP) peat sediments from northern Europe and used them to reconstruct contemporary floristic compositions at two sites. The majority of the samples provided plant DNA sequences of good quality with success amplification rates depending on age. DNA and sequencing analysis provided five plant taxa from the older site and nine taxa from the younger site, corresponding to 7% and 15% of the total number of taxa identified by the three proxies together. At both sites, pollen analysis detected the largest (54) and DNA the lowest (10) number of taxa, but five of the DNA taxa were not detected by pollen and macrofossils. The finding of a larger overlap between DNA and pollen than between DNA and macrofossils proxies seems to go against our previous suggestion based on lacustrine sediments that DNA originates principally from plant tissues and less from pollen. At both sites, we also detected Quercus spp. DNA, but few pollen grains were found in the record, and these are normally interpreted as long-distance dispersal. We confirm that in palaeoecological investigations, sedimentary DNA analysis is less comprehensive than classical morphological analysis, but is a complementary and important tool to obtain a more complete picture of past flora.
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