Museum to the world

Fifteen ultracold freezers tucked in a storeroom basement corner of LSU’s Foster Hall hold one of the world’s largest and oldest museum collections of its kind.

The collection holds the keys to mysteries from all over the planet, and scientists submit thousands of requests each year to borrow its precious artifacts.

The LSU Museum of Natural Science Collection of Genetic Resources doesn’t beckon visitors with glass-encased artifacts, fancy displays, or touch-and-speak computer generated solar systems, and you won’t bump into runny-nosed fifth-graders in the halls.

The museum does, however, possess 70,232 samples of tissue, frozen solid at 80 degrees Celsius—cold enough to stop a human heart. It contains samples of more than half the estimated bird species on the planet, in addition to reptiles, amphibians, fish and mammals.

The tiny specimens are preserved in “nunc” tubes, vials about half the size of a typical test tube but capable of withstanding ultracold temperatures. “In theory, it could be archived for hundreds, or even thousands of years,” says curator Robb Brumfield. “It’s a permanent record of that individual locked in space and time.”

The next largest tissue collection holds 30,000 samples, making LSU’s collection the world’s largest by far. And, Brumfield says, it was established in 1979, which makes it the world’s oldest.

Partially funded by the National Science Foundation, the museum’s collection is heavily used worldwide to conduct published research, and it helps to bring in grants for the researchers. “There are some museums that are basically all exhibits; there are some that are all research. I’d say we are primarily a research museum,” Brumfield says.

A frozen museum in a basement may seem unorthodox, but it’s in the tradition of the earliest museums, explains Frederick Sheldon, the other curator of the Genetic Resources Collection and director of LSUMNS.

A museum—the word is derived from the Greek word muses—is a place devoted to learning and the arts. Museums became known as galleries to showcase exhibits to the public, but “natural history museums started as research institutions, and exhibits were secondary,” Sheldon says.

Boosting the collection’s global importance is 21st century DNA technology.

“The beauty of DNA is that there are millions of base pairs in there to study,” Brumfield says. “Whereas a bird only has two wings, a finite number of feathers and a tail, once we access the DNA, we’ve got a lot of information we can look at.”

Exhibits might help “bridge the public” to better understand the scientific contributions of the collection, Brumfield says. The museum’s primary direct benefit is to the scientific community, but there is a trickle-down effect on the general public thanks to its contribution to basic research done for the sake of knowledge.

“The way science works is that the basic research is like a feeder,” Brumfield says. “It goes along in small increments through time, with people making small discoveries, and eventually, enough knowledge comes along to allow a group of scientists to synthesize that knowledge, and a large advancement is made.”

Scientists around the globe request as many as 4,000 samples per year for their research, each specimen no larger than a sunflower seed. Of course, these museum loans don’t actually come back—the tissues are non-renewable, so requests require lengthy paperwork and permits. This prohibits drying up the collection, not to mention discouraging frivolous requests.

Some of the requests have significant real-world impact, like the samples requested by officials of the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries in their efforts to catch poachers. Sheldon says the nestlings of the yellow-crowned night heron are sometimes captured illegally and eaten as a French/Creole delicacy called grosbec. Confiscated samples are occasionally sent to the museum to identify the poached species. “One time, wildlife officials found a whole pick-up truck of grosbec,” he says.

But most of the borrowed specimens are used to construct family trees of species or populations for evolutionary studies. Some can be quite unusual, Sheldon says. For example, the U.S. Air Force requested samples to help determine which species of birds are sucked into jet engines.

Authorities also asked for python samples to determine if a man was accidentally killed by his pet snake. Epidemiologists used LSU specimens to study outbreaks of both the Hantavirus—transmitted through rodents—and the West Nile virus—spread by mosquitoes.

“It’s like a big archive,” Sheldon says. “More information is stored in this tissue collection than we’ll ever know about in our lifetimes.”