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Marian Litvaitis, professor emeritus at the University of New Hampshire, decided to retire in December 2019. And she wondered what would happen to her worms.

Not just any worm: marine polyclad flatworms. They are visually stunning from the skunk colored frills. supposedly free gold-framed fuchsia body Pseudoceros ferrugineus.

Dr. Litvaitis had studied worms for decades, traveling to the Caribbean and Indo-Pacific seas to collect hundreds of tissue and DNA samples, all stored in his lab’s minus 80-degree freezer. However, the labs at his school are emptied after the researchers leave, and there is often no system to ensure that irreplaceable collections of scientific secrets don’t end up in a dumpster alongside old papers and broken lab equipment. Dr. Litvaitis recalled that some of his colleagues struggled to find a place for shelves of hundreds of hagfish specimens or lynx skulls.

Taking them home doesn’t work either.

Dr. “I didn’t want to keep them in the freezer in my basement,” Litvaitis said of flatworms, adding that power outages are not uncommon in her New Hampshire neighborhood. He reached out to the Ocean Genome Legacy Center, a marine DNA genome bank near Boston that is part of Northeastern University, to see if he wanted to collect samples from 466 worms.

This is Dr. Litvaitis’s collection new program At the Genome Resource Rescue Project, which hopes to save retired researchers from hard-earned marine collections with nowhere else to go. The project currently includes thousands of donated samples from three researchers.

“Very few people have plans for their collections,” said Dan Distel, director of the centre. “We don’t think about it until the time comes, and then it might be a little late.”

Biocollections can appear static, conjuring up images of pinned butterflies or jars of pickled fish. But they do require space and maintenance—empty rooms for lynx skulls and ultra-cold freezers for flatworm DNA—constant expenses that universities can try to ditch when collectors’ days of research are over.

According to one study, collections tied to specific research projects often lack funds for long-term maintenance and storage. 2020 report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine. These collections can “be orphaned” – held without care or attention, which could damage the collection beyond repair, the report said. And the scientific community is casually informed that these collections can be discarded or otherwise abandoned.

“The fate of such collections is often idiosyncratic, depending on a collector’s relationship with a natural history museum, the venue, the funding, how new material can contribute to an institution’s mission, and the quality of the collection presented as a gift.” An evolutionary ecologist at Arizona State University and co-chairman of the committee behind the report, said in an email.

Dr. Distel added that he was not aware of other programs such as the Genome Resource Rescue Project, but that researchers sometimes turn to museums to donate their collections after they retire. In 2017, eighth-generation entomologists Lois and Charlie O’Brien donated Private collections of more than one million lice and 250,000 herb plants to Arizona State University.

Dr. “However, it can be quite difficult for researchers to find homes for collections that have no public value,” Distel said. All weeds are pleasing to the eye, but frozen tissue samples are less visually appealing.

Dr. Distel said it’s good science to preserve collections for future generations. It is also good for conserving natural resources.

The collection of biological samples requires the removal of organisms from their natural environment, which is an inherently destructive practice. Dr. “This is a Wild West mentality,” Distel said. Some researchers have previously asked, ‘Did someone else collect these materials?’ He said that they collected samples without thinking.

The more specimens are preserved, the less the organism has to die for science in the future.

Collection is also expensive and is often done on research trips funded by grants. H. William Detrich, professor emeritus of biochemistry and marine biology at Northeastern University, is donating part of his Antarctic fish collection. clean blood ice fish, towards the centre. Obtaining this collection required traveling to Palmer Station in Antarctica and traveling in a research vessel.

Dr. “The logistics and support of my only program for over 30 years has been millions and millions of dollars,” Detrich said. “I feel morally and ethically obliged to ensure that they are used in the future.”

Dr. In Distel’s eyes, Dr. The preservation of Detrich’s collections is particularly urgent because they capture a timely snapshot in Antarctica – an ecosystem that is one of the fastest warming areas on Earth.

This could make such collections the only record of what biodiversity looked like in previously intact ecosystems, allowing scientists to compare populations over time and degrees of degradation.

Throughout his career, Dr. Litvaitis watched the tropical waters she sampled from the Caribbean deteriorate due to overfishing and climate change. This destruction is one reason it chose to focus on polyclad flatworms, which are dependent on specific habitats such as coral reefs and can easily absorb pollutants from their body walls. Dr. Litvaitis donated several replicate specimens, specimens of the same worm species from different geographic areas, as a record of where the worms once lived.

Dr. “To know what we have before we kill him,” Litvaitis said.

Ocean Genome Legacy Center is making samples available To researchers from around the world, Dr. Distel said open collections allow new researchers to verify or question results from samples and draw more robust findings.

Dr. Distel hopes the collections recovery program can inspire researchers who aren’t close to retirement to start thinking proactively about the future of their specimens. Planning for retirement is difficult when dealing with grant applications, paper submissions, and actual research. Dr. “It’s a kind of rat race,” Detrich said. “You’re trying to keep your head above water.”

But the sooner researchers start thinking about conservation, the sooner they can begin to document their collections in ways that are meaningful and accessible to the general community, Dr. Distel. “When they’re at the end of their careers, donating material to a collection can be a trivial task,” he added.

After retiring at the end of 2021, Dr. Detrich still organizes his samples for donation, matching the samples in the freezer with handwritten notes kept on fishing logs and dissection records. “For about 30 years, you can imagine where exactly the samples were found might have been a bit suspicious,” he said.

Dr. Detrich started with four full freezers filled with samples; now one and a half has fallen into the freezer.

Ocean Genome Legacy Center, Dr. He didn’t have enough space to take all of Detrich’s samples, so he sent some to colleagues who were conducting active research. One of her former colleagues, Jacob Daane, now a researcher at the University of Houston, heats icefish embryos to predict how climate change might affect their development.

Dr. Litvaitis is now happy to be the caretaker of the parts of the 466 long-dead worms. “I diverted my interests to other things,” she said, such as writing bedtime stories for her grandchild, researching family history, and knitting.

The center has already digitized its collection so anyone who wants to study marine polyclinics can do so. Dr. “This is how we can advance science,” Litvaitis said. “What do we have without the work of previous people?”