"Working with ancient, sample-derived DNA is tough when compared with fresh samples," said co-author Andy Bhattacharjee of Agilent's Life Sciences Group. "Thirty to forty thousand years have passed since Neandertals walked on earth, and all that is left are ancient bones containing severely degraded DNA. The DNA itself has also undergone a sort of chemical aging (deamination).

"However, the worst offender is microbial contamination caused by colonization of microbes," Bhattacharjee continued. "Therefore, removal of this contaminant DNA is of paramount importance, as this allows more coverage of the endogenous genome and therefore allows one to better decipher the genetic code. The capture methodology solves this big problem by enriching for Neandertal sequences and depleting contaminant DNA. It's an elegant solution."

"The methodology developed during this study can also be applied to other challenging studies in paleontology and archeology as well as in human forensics, which have been difficult to study systematically so far," said co-author Leo Brizuela, also of Agilent. "This has been a very exciting and challenging project, and we appreciate the opportunity to work with this group."

"These experiments were enabled by the flexibility and quality of the Agilent microarray platform on which the array capture technology is based," Brizuela added. "In addition, we benefited from our experience in human exome sequencing, developed from our interaction with the Hannon lab at CSHL and Jay Shendure of the University of Washington."

SOURCE Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and Agilent Technologies