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Natural history museum collections harbour a record of wild species from the past centuries, providing a unique opportunity to study animals as well as their infectious agents. Thousands of great ape specimens are kept in these collections, and could become an important resource for studying the evolution of DNA viruses. Their genetic material is likely to be preserved in dry museum specimens, as reported previously for monkeypox virus genomes from historical orangutan specimens. Here, we screened 209 great ape museum specimens for 99 different DNA viruses, using hybridization capture coupled with short-read high-throughput sequencing. We determined the presence of multiple viruses within this dataset from historical specimens and obtained several near-complete viral genomes. In particular, we report high-coverage (> 18-fold) hepatitis B virus genomes from one gorilla and two chimpanzee individuals, which are phylogenetically placed within clades infecting the respective host species., Competing Interests: Competing interests: The authors declare no competing interests. Data can be reprocessed using the tools described in the Methods section, namely kraken2 for metagenomic classification, bwa for mapping to reference genomes, following the documentation in the associated repository. Custom code for processing and visualisation is available under https://github.com/admixVIE/Great-Ape-DNA-Virome ., (© 2024. The Author(s).)

Natural history museums hold vast collections of biomaterials. The collections in museums, often painstakingly sampled, are largely unexplored treasures that may help us better understand biodiversity on the planet. Museum collections can provide a unique window into the past of species long gone or currently declining due to human activity. From a molecular perspective, however, many museum samples are stored under conditions that hasten the damage of DNA, RNA and proteins. For example, samples in wet collections are those stored in liquid preservatives, typically ethanol. These ethanol-preserved tissues are often, although not always, formalin-fixed prior to storage, which may damage DNA. In this and recent issues of Molecular Ecology Resources, Straube et al (2021), O'Connell et al (2021) and Hahn et al (2022) explore different types of specimens from museum wet collections as new sources of DNA for scientific studies. All three articles found that for wet museum collections, overall specimen condition mattered most for recovering high-quality genomic DNA., (© 2022 The Authors. Molecular Ecology Resources published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.)