Laura Parducci

Sapienza University of Rome | la sapienza · Department of Environmental Biology

Tree Refugia Ideas of how and when boreal plants spread to the formerly glaciated parts of the world following the retreat of the glaciers 9000 years ago are long debated. Models of the postglacial spread of boreal plants argue for dispersal from southern refugia; however, Parducci et al. (p. 1083 ) have shown that both spruce and pine were present...

Predicting and anticipating the effects of current and future climate warming on plant communities requires a comprehensive understanding of past ecosystem dynamics. In this context, Palaeoecological studies using sedimentary ancient DNA (sedDNA) offer unique advantages over conventional pollen and macrofossil methods due to higher taxonomic resolu...

Ancient environmental DNA (aeDNA) data are close to enabling insights into past global-scale biodiversity dynamics at unprecedented taxonomic extent and resolution. However, achieving this potential requires solutions that bridge bioinformatics and paleoecoinformatics. Essential needs include support for dynamic taxonomic inferences, dynamic age in...

Anthropogenic activities are triggering global changes in the environment, causing entire communities of plants, pollinators and their interactions to restructure, and ultimately leading to species declines. To understand the mechanisms behind community shifts and declines, as well as monitoring and managing impacts, a global effort must be made to...

Contrasting theories exist regarding how Norway spruce (Picea abies) recolonized Fennoscandia after the last glaciation and both early Holocene establishments from western microrefugia and late Holocene colonization from the east have been postulated. Here, we show that Norway spruce was present in southern Fennoscandia as early as 14.7 ± 0.1 cal....

Hybridization capture is an emerging method making use of short oligonucleotide baits to enrich DNA libraries for genomic fragments of specific organisms thus enabling detection of their presence in environmental samples. Although it offers a primer‐independent alternative to metabarcoding, little empirical work has been dedicated to characterizing...

Poster presenting the preliminary results of an oral microbiome reconstruction in three populations from Central Italy dated to the Roman Empire and the beginning of the Longobard occupation in Italy.

Over the past quarter‐century, environmental DNA (eDNA) has been ascendant as a tool to detect, measure and monitor biodiversity (species and communities), as a means of elucidating biological interaction networks, and as a window into understanding past patterns of biodiversity. However, only recently has the potential of eDNA been realized in the...

The animal gut microbiome has been implicated in a number of key biological processes, ranging from digestion to behavior, and has also been suggested to facilitate local adaptation. Yet studies in wild animals rarely compare multiple populations that differ ecologically, which is the level at which local adaptation may occur. Further, few studies...

Anthropogenic activities are leading to changes in the environment at global scales, and understanding these changes requires rapid, high-throughput methods of assessment. Pollen DNA metabarcoding and related methods provide advantages in throughput and efficiency over traditional methods, such as microscopic identification of pollen and visual obs...

Conservation efforts tend to focus on populations that are genetically differentiated without paying attention to their ecological differentiation. However, isolated populations may be ecologically unique, an important aspect for the design of appropriate conservation measures for endangered species. Here we investigate the interplay between diet a...

PaleoEcoGen is a new working group that was launched with the aim of bringing together scientists from around the world who use ancient environmental DNA (ancient eDNA) as a novel proxy to examine the response of past biological communities to environmental changes (pastglobalchanges.org/paleoecogen). We are particularly interested in exploiting th...

Since the seminal paper in 1998 (Coolen and Overmann), sedimentary ancient DNA (sedaDNA) has become a powerful tool in paleoecology to reconstruct past changes in terrestrial and aquatic biodiversity. Still, sedaDNA is an emerging tool and there is a need for calibrations and validations to ensure the reliability of sedaDNA as a proxy to reconstruc...

The use of lake sedimentary DNA to track the long-term changes in both terrestrial and aquatic biota is a rapidly advancing field in paleoecological research. Although largely applied nowadays, knowledge gaps remain in this field and there is therefore still research to be conducted to ensure the reliability of the sedimentary DNA signal. Building...

The purpose of this Milankovitch review is to explain the significance of Quaternary DNA studies and the importance of the recent methodological advances that have enabled the study of late Quaternary remains in more detail, and the testing of new assumptions in evolutionary biology and phylogeography to reconstruct the past. The topic is wide, and...

The lake sediments of Hässeldala Port in south-east Sweden provide an archive of local and regional environmental conditions ~14.5–9.5 ka BP (thousand years before present) and allow testing DNA sequencing techniques to reconstruct past vegetation changes. We combined shotgun sequencing with plant micro- and macrofossil analyses to investigate sedi...

In this study, we used maximum entropy modeling to predict the climate change effects on the distribution range of a subalpine steppe flora species complex, Acanthophyllum squarrosum (Caryophyllaceae). We used data from four different models, with two representative concentration pathways of climate scenarios in modern time, 2030, 2070 and 2080. Ou...

The field of ancient DNA has received much attention since the mid-1980s, when the first sequences of extinct species were obtained from museum and archaeological specimens. Early analyses focused on organellar DNA (mitochondrial in animals and chloroplast in plants) as these are present in multiple copies in the cells making isolation and analyses...

The Lateglacial/early Holocene sediments from the ancient lake at H€ asseldala Port, southern Sweden provide an important archive for the environmental and climatic shifts at the end of the last ice age and the transition into the present Interglacial. The existing multi-proxy data set highlights the complex interplay of physical and ecological cha...

Ancient DNA from historical and subfossil wood has a great potential to provide new insights into the history of tree populations. However, its extraction and analysis have not become routine, mainly because contamination of the wood with modern plant material can complicate the verification of genetic information. Here, we used sapwood tissue from...

The final stages of the Last Glacial in the Northern Hemisphere, between 19 and 11.7 thousand years before present, were punctuated by distinct and alternating warmer and colder climate states before Interglacial temperatures were attained, which in turn strongly influenced past vegetation. One of the best studied Lateglacial lake sedimentary recor...

Mediterranean forests are fragile ecosystems vulnerable to recent global warming and reduction of precipitation, and a long-term negative effect is expected on vegetation with increasing drought and in areas burnt by fires. We investigated the spatial distribution of genetic variation of Arbutus unedo in the western Iberia Peninsula, using plastid...

The absolute (counts) and relative (frequency) frequencies of the fifteen detected haplotypes. Haplotype refers to four chloroplast microsatellites composition respectively: AU1, AU2, AU4 and AU7. (DOCX)

Development of the percentage of burned area (sum of the burned areas/area of the country) and number of wildfires, per year, in the Southern Mediterranean countries, Portugal, Spain, France, Italy and Greece over a 30-year period (1980–2005). (A) Percentage of burned area development. (B) Number of wildfires development. European Commission (2007)...

Sampled populations. Map highlighting the populations’ sampled (black dots) and the A. unedo stand distribution according to the 2006 Portuguese National Forest Inventory: http://www.icnf.pt/portal/florestas/ifn (orange triangles). (TIF)

Contents I. II. III. IV. V. VI. VII. VIII. IX. X. XI. References SUMMARY: Recent advances in sequencing technologies now permit the analyses of plant DNA from fossil samples (ancient plant DNA, plant aDNA), and thus enable the molecular reconstruction of palaeofloras. Hitherto, ancient frozen soils have proved excellent in preserving DNA molecules,...

Boreal species were repeatedly exposed to ice ages and went through cycles of contraction and expansion while sister species alternated periods of contact and isolation. The resulting genetic structure is consequently complex and demographic inferences are intrinsically challenging. The range of Norway spruce (Picea abies) and Siberian spruce (Pice...

Ancient DNA (aDNA) in lake sediments opens novel approaches to a better understanding of past environmental changes in aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems. The lake sediment sequences of Hässeldala and Atteköpsmosse in southern Sweden form two excellent records to investigate the wide spectrum of aquatic and terrestrial floral, faunal and microbial...

Over the past, plant species have persisted through several glacial and interglacial periods. Plants' response was principally migration and adaptation and the plant fossil record shows how fast trees migrated in response to these changes. Migration rates however, seem too high to have been consistently achieved by known plant dispersal mechanisms,...

We compared DNA, pollen and macrofossil data obtained from Weichselian interstadial (age more than 40 kyr) and Holocene (maximum age 8400 cal yr BP) peat sediments from northern Europe and used them to reconstruct contemporary floristic compositions at two sites. The majority of the samples provided plant DNA sequences of good quality with success...

The ability of plants to track seasonal changes is largely dependent on genes assigned to the photoperiod pathway, and variation in those genes is thereby important for adaptation to local day length conditions. Extensive physiological data in several temperate conifer species suggest that populations are adapted to local light conditions, but data...

Abies × borisii-regis Mattf. (King Boris fir) is a taxon endemic to the southern Balkan Peninsula, described as a hybrid between the widespread A. alba Mill. (Silver fir) and the Greek endemic A. cephalonica Loud (Greek fir). Even though A. × borisii-regis has attracted much research attention in the past, its origin, geographical distribution and...

Plant and animal biodiversity can be studied by obtaining DNA directly from the environment. This new approach in combination with the use of generic barcoding primers (metabarcoding) has been suggested as complementary or alternative to traditional biodiversity monitoring in ancient soil sediments. However, the extent to which metabarcoding truly...

Birks et al. question our proposition that trees survived the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) in Northern Scandinavia. We dispute their interpretation of our modern genetic data but agree that more work is required. Our field and laboratory procedures were robust; contamination is an unlikely explanation of our results. Their description of Endletvatn a...

Location and geographical coordinates of the extant Norway spruce (Picea abies) samples and herbarium specimens used for cpDNA analysis.

Sequences of the cpDNA fragments in Norway spruce (Picea abies) with information on the region name, applied primer pairs, name of the fossil and extant samples and length of the sequence. Bold and underlined bases refer to variable positions or blocks.

Radiocarbon dates and age-depth modeling of sediment core TDB-1, Taŭl dintre Brazi (1740 m a.s.l), Retezat Mountains, South Carpathians, Romania.

Studies on allele length polymorphism designate several glacial refugia for Norway spruce (Picea abies) in the South Carpathian Mountains, but infer only limited expansion from these refugia after the last glaciation. To better understand the genetic dynamics of a South Carpathian spruce lineage, we compared ancient DNA from 10,700 and 11,000-year-...

In this study, we present a DNA genotyping method of fossil pollen of Scots pine (Pinus sylvestris L.) and Norway spruce (Picea abies (L.) Karst) extracted from Holocene lake sediments (from the past 11,500 years). Genetic analysis of pollen of different ages extracted from different lake sediments allows direct evaluation of the history and dynami...

This paper describes our recent attempt to isolate and analyse DNA from old plant remains of the common peatmoss Sphagnum fuscum retrieved from a peat core collected in the mire Fuglmyra, in central Norway. DNA was recoverable and usable from subfossilized (10-450 years old) plant remains of the peatmoss. A chloroplast (trnL) and two nuclear (ITS2...

Understanding climate change and its potential impact on species, populations and communities is one of the most pressing questions of twenty-first-century conservation planning. Palaeobiogeographers working on Cenozoic fossil records and other lines of evidence are producing important insights into the dynamic nature of climate and the equally dyn...

This paper describes our recent extraction of ancient DNA (aDNA) from Holocene pollen and discusses the potential of the technique for elucidating timescales of evolutionary change. We show that plastid DNA is recoverable and usable from pollen grains of Scots pine Pinus sylvestris from 10 ka and 100 years ago. Comparison of the ancient sequences w...

Assessments of plant population dynamics in space and time have depended on dated records of fossil pollen synthesized on a subcontinental scale. Genetic analyses of extant populations have revealed spatial relationships that are indicative of past spatial dynamics, but lack an explicit timescale. Synthesis of these data requires genetic analyses f...

Ancient DNA has received much attention since the mid-1980s, when the first sequence of an extinct animal species was recovered from a museum specimen. Since then, the majority of ancient DNA studies have focused predominantly on animal species, while studies in plant palaeogenetics have been rather limited, with the notable exception of cultivated...

Abies nebrodensis (Lojac.) Mattei (Sicilian fir) is a forest tree species endemic to the mountainous regions of northern Sicily (the Madonie Range) that is currently represented by just one population of 29 individuals. The major questions relating to this species are its unknown origin and its uncertain taxonomic position. According to many author...

The chloroplast trnS-psbC gene regions from total genomic DNA of 119 accessions from seven small millet species were amplified by polymerase chain reaction (PCR) and digested with eight restriction enzymes individually as well as in combinations of two enzymes to generate restriction fragment length polymorphism (PCR-RFLP). PCR-RFLP with individual...

Abies nebrodensis (Lojac.) Mattei (Sicilian fir) is an endangered species represented by only one population of 29 adult individuals occurring in a limited area of the Madonie Range in northern Sicily (Italy). Taxonomic boundaries between this taxon and the neighboring Abies species are not clear. In this study, we used six chloroplast simple-seque...

Thesis (doctoral)--Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, 2000. Includes bibliographical references.

We used PCR-RFLP analysis of the chloroplast DNA of the genus Abies (family Pinaceae), to determine if the method could be employed to detect inter-specific variation in this genus and to study how the variation was distributed in different regions of the genome. Ten different chloroplast DNA regions, consisting of coding and non-coding DNA sequenc...

Italy represents the southern limit of Abies alba (Mill.) (silver fir) distribution in Europe. In this region, populations are widely spread in different and isolated habitats. We used allozyme markers to study the genetic structure of ten natural populations of this species from the northern, central, and southern parts of Italy. Mean expected het...