TY  - JOUR
A1  - Gansauge, Marie-Theres
A1  - Meyer, Matthias
T1  - Selective enrichment of damaged DNA molecules for ancient genome sequencing
Y1  - 2014/09/01 
JF  - Genome Research 
JO  - Genome Research 
SP  - 1543 
EP  - 1549 
DO  - 10.1101/gr.174201.114 
VL  - 24 
IS  - 9 
UR  - http://genome.cshlp.org/content/24/9/1543.abstract 
N2  - Contamination by present-day human and microbial DNA is one of the major hindrances for large-scale genomic studies using ancient biological material. We describe a new molecular method, U selection, which exploits one of the most distinctive features of ancient DNA—the presence of deoxyuracils—for selective enrichment of endogenous DNA against a complex background of contamination during DNA library preparation. By applying the method to Neanderthal DNA extracts that are heavily contaminated with present-day human DNA, we show that the fraction of useful sequence information increases ∼10-fold and that the resulting sequences are more efficiently depleted of human contamination than when using purely computational approaches. Furthermore, we show that U selection can lead to a four- to fivefold increase in the proportion of endogenous DNA sequences relative to those of microbial contaminants in some samples. U selection may thus help to lower the costs for ancient genome sequencing of nonhuman samples also. 
ER  -