RT Journal
A1 Gansauge, Marie-Theres
A1 Meyer, Matthias
T1 Selective enrichment of damaged DNA molecules for ancient genome sequencing
JF Genome Research 
JO Genome Research 
YR 2014 
FD September 01 
VO 24 
IS 9 
SP 1543 
OP 1549 
DO 10.1101/gr.174201.114 
UL http://genome.cshlp.org/content/24/9/1543.abstract 
AB 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.