Museômica: museus e coleções biológicas como base de dados, uma abordagem a partir da Museologia

In recent decades, natural science museums have come to be understood as scientific databases, beyond the social and scientific functions they already fulfill. This repositioning underlies Museomics, an emerging field that combines concepts and techniques from Bioinformatics and Genomics to treat biological collections as biobanks and data sources applicable to contemporary scientific research. This article aims to theoretically discuss the concept of museomics, analyzing its foundations, its relationship with museums, and presenting concrete examples of its application. This is a theoretical, qualitative, exploratory study based on a review of national and international literature on museomics. The results indicate that museomics enables the extraction of genetic data from historical specimens preserved in museums, contributing to the resolution of taxonomic questions, the reconstruction of phylogenies, the investigation of extinct biodiversity, and the monitoring of environmental changes. Concrete cases involving the use of next-generation genomic technologies (NGS) demonstrate the impact of museomics on different areas of the Biological Sciences. The conclusion is that museomics broadens the scope of museology, challenging it to incorporate informational, genetic, and computational frameworks into its practices. At the same time, the proposal is to strengthen interdisciplinary research that articulates museums, data, and life sciences, consolidating museomics as a subfield capable of expanding the role of museums in the production and circulation of scientific knowledge.