Thanks David, that is a very useful article (Mar 2002, available here: http://www.spnhc.org/25). It includes a good summary of the impacts of different fixation and storage methods on the specimen and the DNA. There has been some progress since then in understanding the biochemistry of formalin fixation, and in extraction of DNA from FFPE samples (e.g. Paireder et al. 2013 Analytical Biochemistry http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0003269713001802). Also, next-gen sequencing has massively increased the potential for using short fragments from degraded DNA. But, despite the potential, in practice it still seems an unsolved problem - I can't find any case studies of people actually using DNA from formalin preserved museum specimens.

I see also that until a couple of years ago SPNHC had a subcommittee on this issue...but it disbanded due to the costs involved in making progress.

Has anyone heard of any recent progress on this front?

I once knew of a protocol that folks were trying to get at any DNA from formalin-fixed specimens but it was largely unsuccessful. The dogma is that it just isnt possible because of what Formalin does to cells.

Hykin, Sarah M., Ke Bi, and Jimmy A. McGuire. "Fixing formalin: a method to recover genomic-scale DNA sequence data from formalin-fixed museum specimens using high-throughput sequencing." PloS one 10.10 (2015): e0141579.

Thanks Scott

Why not there is no any problem

This may help:

Article Museum genomics: Low-cost and high-accuracy genetic data fro...

Formalin fixes tissue by acting over proteins, not genome. After formalin treatment tissue gains more strength mechanically, this may hinder cell wall breaking a difficult task, otherwise In my view there should not be any problem extracting DNA from formalin fixed tissue.