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<p>Beyond its role as an important palaeoenvironmental proxy, terrestrial fossil pollen represents an ideal material for radiocarbon dating, while also serving as raw material for stable isotope and ancient DNA analyses, thereby providing complementary perspectives on past environmental and ecological change. However, obtaining high-purity pollen concentrates from sediments is difficult. Recently, methods for extracting fossil pollen from sediments using flow cytometer cell sorters have been developed, yet conventional sorters rely on empirical blind gating of fluorescence and scatter signals, often leading to the inadvertent inclusion of non-pollen particles and hindering the achievement of sufficiently high-purity fossil pollen concentrates; in addition, techniques for isolating single-taxon fossil pollen grains for taxon-specific analyses remain an unresolved methodological challenge. Here we present an approach for extracting pollen grains using cutting-edge fluorescence image-enabled cell sorting with real-time imaging. This method establishes a novel gating workflow that integrates high-resolution image-derived morphological parameters with fluorescence intensities to isolate highly purified single-taxon pollen grains. It is based on the principles that fluorescence characteristics exhibit taxon-specific patterns and that pollen grains from the same taxon display consistent morphological features distinguishable from irregular organic debris in sediments. As an applied example, a sample from the Wushan (WS) peatland, Leizhou Peninsula, achieved purities of 99% for <i>Altingia</i> concentrates and 97% for <i>Nyssa</i> concentrates, yielding the first successful isolation of single-taxon fossil pollen from tropical peat deposits characterised by highly diverse palynomorphs assemblages and abundant plant debris. Accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) radiocarbon (<sup>14</sup>C) dating of the highly purified pollen concentrates sorted in our study provides a solution to the dating challenges of the WS peatland, which were likely affected by carbon contamination, and helps to reconstruct a reliable chronological framework for multiproxy palaeoenvironmental reconstructions.</p>

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First successful purification of single-taxon fossil pollen from tropical peat sediments

  • 期刊论文

  • 发表日期：

    2026年5月3日

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  • Yuanbo Liu,
  • Ting Ma,
  • Tianyu Du,
  • Jinhui Wei,
  • Xianxin Dong,
  • Xiaoyan Ning,
  • Zhuo Zheng

摘要

Beyond its role as an important palaeoenvironmental proxy, terrestrial fossil pollen represents an ideal material for radiocarbon dating, while also serving as raw material for stable isotope and ancient DNA analyses, thereby providing complementary perspectives on past environmental and ecological change. However, obtaining high-purity pollen concentrates from sediments is difficult. Recently, methods for extracting fossil pollen from sediments using flow cytometer cell sorters have been developed, yet conventional sorters rely on empirical blind gating of fluorescence and scatter signals, often leading to the inadvertent inclusion of non-pollen particles and hindering the achievement of sufficiently high-purity fossil pollen concentrates; in addition, techniques for isolating single-taxon fossil pollen grains for taxon-specific analyses remain an unresolved methodological challenge. Here we present an approach for extracting pollen grains using cutting-edge fluorescence image-enabled cell sorting with real-time imaging. This method establishes a novel gating workflow that integrates high-resolution image-derived morphological parameters with fluorescence intensities to isolate highly purified single-taxon pollen grains. It is based on the principles that fluorescence characteristics exhibit taxon-specific patterns and that pollen grains from the same taxon display consistent morphological features distinguishable from irregular organic debris in sediments. As an applied example, a sample from the Wushan (WS) peatland, Leizhou Peninsula, achieved purities of 99% for Altingia concentrates and 97% for Nyssa concentrates, yielding the first successful isolation of single-taxon fossil pollen from tropical peat deposits characterised by highly diverse palynomorphs assemblages and abundant plant debris. Accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) radiocarbon (14C) dating of the highly purified pollen concentrates sorted in our study provides a solution to the dating challenges of the WS peatland, which were likely affected by carbon contamination, and helps to reconstruct a reliable chronological framework for multiproxy palaeoenvironmental reconstructions.