10 Facts About Ancient DNA

Laborious processes that were required at that time to sequence such DNA were an effective brake on the study of ancient DNA and the field of museomics.

Double primer PCR amplification of aAncient DNA can produce highly skewed and non-authentic sequence artifacts.

Soon a series of incredible findings had been published, claiming authentic Ancient DNA could be extracted from specimens that were millions of years old, into the realms of what Lindahl has labelled Antediluvian Ancient DNA.

When in 1995 two further studies reported dinosaur Ancient DNA sequences extracted from a Cretaceous egg, it seemed that the field would revolutionize knowledge of the Earth's evolutionary past.

Since 2009 the field of aAncient DNA studies has been revolutionized with the introduction of much cheaper research techniques.

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The use of high-throughput Next Generation Sequencing techniques in the field of ancient DNA research has been essential for reconstructing the genomes of ancient or extinct organisms.

The damage characteristics and ability of aAncient DNA to survive through time restricts possible analyses and places an upper limit on the age of successful samples.

New methods have emerged in recent years to prevent possible contamination of aAncient DNA samples, including conducting extractions under extreme sterile conditions, using special adapters to identify endogenous molecules of the sample, and applying bioinformatics to resulting sequences based on known reads in order approximate rates of contamination.

The majority of human aAncient DNA studies have focused on extracting Ancient DNA from two sources much more common in the archaeological record: bones and teeth.

The bone that is most often used for Ancient DNA extraction is the petrous ear bone, since its dense structure provides good conditions for Ancient DNA preservation.