The Sources and Fates of Lake Sedimentary DNA | Book Chapter

For over two decades, ancient DNA (aDNA) from various organisms has been successfully recovered from lake sediments from all over the world, ranging from decades to hundreds of thousands of years old. Analysis of lake sedimentary DNA (sedDNA) has provided new information about past aquatic and terrestrial biodiversity in various biomes, even in absence of visible remains. The reliability of these DNA records, in terms of representativeness of the past composition of living organisms, is a matter of methods applied, but also of taphonomic processes at the origin of the presence/absence of the DNA molecules screened for in the sediments. The state of the art of these taphonomic processes is presented in this chapter.