NAISS
SUPR
NAISS Projects
SUPR
Storing Ancient DNA from Greenlandic Lakes
Dnr:

NAISS 2025/23-621

Type:

NAISS Small Storage

Principal Investigator:

Jamie Alumbaugh

Affiliation:

Stockholms universitet

Start Date:

2025-10-29

End Date:

2026-03-01

Primary Classification:

10510: Palaeontology and Palaeoecology

Webpage:

Allocation

Abstract

Arctic landscapes are responding more rapidly to anthropogenic warming compared to the rest of the world. Greenland is particularly affected, as increasing mean annual temperatures have triggered intensifying positive feedbacks between ice loss, lower albedo, shrub encroachment, and increasing precipitation. Understanding how resilient Arctic organisms have been to warming in the past can help conservationists develop realistic management plans for the future, but knowledge gaps remain for many taxa. To this end, I am using sedimentary ancient DNA records from five lakes distributed throughout northern Greenland to build a comprehensive understanding of how plant and animal communities have responded to environmental changes since the Late Pleistocene (ca. 13,000 years BP). I am applying for 5 TB of storage from PDC to complement my currently approved compute project NAISS 2025/22-1122 for bioinformatics analyses on sedaDNA data from Greenland. I am currently storing my Greenland data on the shared storage project NAISS 2025/6-123 under PI Peter Heintzman. However, that storage project is becoming full, and I will soon be adding many more samples and reference indices to my current workflow. I currently have 32 samples, two bowtie2 indexes, and several scripts in my folder for Greenland, which is currently at 2.1 TB. Each sample requires approx. 22 GB of storage for all workflow components, from pre-preprocessing to authentication. The two indices I am storing are between 155 (plants) and 930 GB (vertebrates). I will need to begin storing data for at least 100 more samples soon, which will require at least another 2.2 TB of storage, and may be adding a new index in order to identify rotifers in my samples.