Science

EVOLUTIONARY BIOLOGY UNIT

Collections | Staff | Projects | Data

THE AUSTRALIAN BIOLOGICAL TISSUE COLLECTION
AN INTERNATIONAL RESOURCE

History and Scope

The Evolutionary Biology Unit (EBU) maintains frozen and alcohol preserved tissues and DNA samples from approximately 80,000 vertebrates and invertebrate specimens. Much of the information on the collection is available on a computer database. The collection is maintained primarily as a research collection in support of the Unitâs molecular systematic research programs and services. Recently, the collection has become much sort after by other research groups within Australia and overseas.

Importance of the Collection

The importance of a companion tissue collection complimenting the specimens deposited in traditional museum collections cannot be overstated. Far less than 1% of the natural history information available from a museum specimen can be obtained from an examination of the carcass itself. By contrast, vast amounts of information regarding the natural history of a species and its ancestors resides directly within the animalâs genetic blueprint, its DNA. Most research in the areas of systematics, evolution, population biology already utilises molecular genetic techniques which require the availability of vouchered tissue specimens, and with the explosive rate of advancement in this area, this trend can only further increase.

The Significance of the Collection

The Australian Biological Tissue Collection (ABTC) at the South Australian Museum was the first such frozen tissue collection in any museum in Australia and one of the first two or three in the world. At present, the ABTC is one of the two or three largest wildlife tissue collections in the world (Dessauer et al. 1996, Hafner et al. 1997). Taxonomic representation includes most of the terrestrial vertebrate genera and a broad representation of major fish and invertebrate groups from Australia and surrounding regions.

Clients

The clientele serviced from the EBU collection includes EBU staff, other South Australian Museum staff, researchers from other museums both in Australia and overseas, other state and commonwealth governmental institutions, universities and non-government organisations.

Usually the interaction involves a collaborative research effort in which the client contributes material to the collection that is either long-termed stored or becomes the subject of an immediate research project. Occasionally frozen material is simply held until the "owner" can make arrangements for its long-term storage or use somewhere else. Increasingly, other researchers request "grants" from the collection for their own independent research.

Access to material from the collection is managed through a grant policy (see Adobe PDF Attachment). A fee is charged for "grants" on an individually negotiated basis. The purpose of the fee is to cover the time spent retrieving tissue samples and some component of the infrastructure costs of maintaining the collection (freezer maintenance and replacements). The fee does not make a charge for the value of the material, as this would contravene state and federal laws prohibiting commercial trade in wildlife species. Nor does the fee seek to recover any of the costs incurred in collection of the material. Requests for grants of tissues currently average one/week.

DATA:

The unit's frozen tissue collection is fully computer catalogued and is available for 'loan' requests. A 'loan' policy is available from Dr.Stephen Donnellan via post, or email.

Genetic evidence for a family structure in stable social aggregations of the Australian lizard Egernia stokesii.

Authors: MG Gardner, CM Bull, SJB Cooper and GA Duffield.

• Raw data Appendix (MS Word) | (Adobe PDF)

As the scientists in the Evolutionary Biology Unit recover the evolutionary relationships of our fauna, we have occasion to use datasets published by other scientists. Often these datasets are not available electronically. EBU scientists will electronically encode such datasets for their own purposes but also make them available to other researchers so that the effort to enter the data onto computers is not unnecessarily duplicated.

Data sets presently available from the Evolutionary Biology Unit’s homepage are:

Kluge, A.G. 1993. Aspidites and the phylogeny of pythonine snakes. Records of the Australian Museum Supplement 19, 1-77.

Note: Both the original data matrix, Table 31 [filename "Kluge1993 -A"]and an expanded matrix that includes explicit outgroup codings [filename "Kluge1993-B"] are available. Both matrices are formatted for PAUP.

References

Dessauer HC Cole CJ Hafner MS. 1996. "Collection and Storage of Frozen Tissues". In Molecular Systematics edited by D Hillis, C Moritz & B Mable. Sinauer, Sunderland Massachusetts

Hafner MS Gannon WL Salazar-Bravo J Alvarez-Castaneda ST. 1997. Mammal Collections in the Western Hemisphere. A publication of the American Society of Mammalogists.