ReviewPhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2015
Ancient and modern environmental DNA.
Review 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 81 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
81 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Environmental palaeogenomic reconstruction of an Ice Age algal population.Communications biology · 2021Pooled it
- Ancient DNA as a temporal lens: reconstructing evolution, migration, and disease dynamics.Journal, genetic engineering & biotechnology · 2026Review
- Sedimentary Ancient DNA Tracks Multi-Kingdom Ecosystem Reorganizations Following Sequential Human Land Use at Crawford Lake.Molecular ecology · 2026Article
- Integrating Water Column and Sediment eDNA Metabarcoding Reveals Seasonal Turnover and Habitat-Specific Differentiation of Fish Communities in a Subtropical Coastal Bay.Ecology and evolution · 2026Article
- A Roadmap for Using Hybridisation Capture-Based Target Enrichment of Ancient Environmental DNA in Palaeoecology.Molecular ecology resources · 2026Review
- Archaeoentomological SedaDNA from two French gallo-roman wells reveals the presence of arthropods not identified by sclerotized remains.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Ancient DNA reconstruction of late holocene ecosystems within the Carpathian basin from paleo-meanders and archaeological deposits.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Properties and Limitations of eDNA Substrates for Terrestrial Animal Monitoring.Molecular ecology resources · 2026Review
- Validating a Target-Enrichment Design for Capturing Uniparental Haplotypes in Ancient Domesticated Animals.Molecular ecology resources · 2025Article
- Sampling techniques and genomic analysis of biological material from artworks.Journal of forensic sciences · 2025Article
- Read Length Dominates Phylogenetic Placement Accuracy of Ancient DNA Reads.Molecular biology and evolution · 2025Article
- Deciphering the artificial evolution of domesticated plants within dynamic habitats.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Environmental DNA sheds new insight on molecular adaptation of foraminifera to temperature from laboratory-controlled culture experiment.Ecology and evolution · 2024Article
- Review
- Psychoactive and other ceremonial plants from a 2,000-year-old Maya ritual deposit at Yaxnohcah, Mexico.PloS one · 2024Article
- Species diversity of fish at the Wuzhizhou Island, South China Sea, based on environmental DNA.Biodiversity data journal · 2024Article
- Paleomicrobiology: Tracking the past microbial life from single species to entire microbial communities.Microbial biotechnology · 2024Review
- Deductive automated pollen classification in environmental samples via exploratory deep learning and imaging flow cytometry.The New phytologist · 2023Article
- Ultra-sensitive detection of ecologically rare fish from eDNA samples based on the RPA-CRISPR/Cas12a technology.iScience · 2023Article
- Environmental DNA Assay for the Detection of the American Bullfrog (Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2023Article
21 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
- Commented on by
Authors and funding
19 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
DNA obtained from environmental samples such as sediments, ice or water (environmental DNA, eDNA), represents an important source of information on past and present biodiversity. It has revealed an ancient forest in Greenland, extended by several thousand years the survival dates for mainland woolly mammoth in Alaska, and pushed back the dates for spruce survival in Scandinavian ice-free refugia during the last glaciation. More recently, eDNA was used to uncover the past 50 000 years of vegetation history in the Arctic, revealing massive vegetation turnover at the Pleistocene/Holocene transition, with implications for the extinction of megafauna. Furthermore, eDNA can reflect the biodiversity of extant flora and fauna, both qualitatively and quantitatively, allowing detection of rare species. As such, trace studies of plant and vertebrate DNA in the environment have revolutionized our knowledge of biogeography. However, the approach remains marred by biases related to DNA behaviour in environmental settings, incomplete reference databases and false positive results due to contamination. We provide a review of the field.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.