Microbial archaeology is flourishing in the era of high-throughput sequencing, revealing the
agents behind devastating historical plagues, identifying the cryptic movements of …

Although a rich record of Pleistocene human-associated archaeological assemblages exists,
the scarcity of hominin fossils often impedes the understanding of which hominins …

Anthropogenic habitat loss and climate change are reducing species’ geographic ranges,
increasing extinction risk and losses of species’ genetic diversity. Although preserving genetic …

Background Intraspecific variation in ploidy occurs in a wide range of species including
pathogenic and nonpathogenic eukaryotes such as yeasts and oomycetes. Ploidy can be …

Herbaria archive a record of changes of worldwide plant biodiversity harbouring millions of
specimens that contain DNA suitable for genome sequencing. To profit from this resource, it …

Potato, one of the most important staple crops, originates from the highlands of the equatorial
Andes. There, potatoes propagate vegetatively via tubers under short days, constant …

We have read the article “Evidence for extensive horizontal gene transfer from the draft
genome of a tardigrade”(1) with interest and were astonished by the high number of genes …

10.7554/eLife.10005.001 Contamination with exogenous DNA is a constant hazard to
ancient DNA studies, since their validity greatly depend on the ancient origin of the retrieved …

Ancient DNA research in the past decade has revealed that European population structure
changed dramatically in the prehistoric period (14,000–3000 years before present, YBP), …

… Weisser and the late Elisabeth Kalko for their role in setting up the Biodiversity
Exploratories project. The work has been (partly) funded by the DFG Priority Program 1374 "Infrastructure-…