TY - GEN A1 - Basler, Nikolas A1 - Xenikoudakis, Georgios A1 - Westbury, Michael V. A1 - Song, Lingfeng A1 - Sheng, Guilian A1 - Barlow, Axel T1 - Reduction of the contaminant fraction of DNA obtained from an ancient giant panda bone T2 - Postprints der Universität Potsdam Mathematisch-Naturwissenschaftliche Reihe N2 - Objective: A key challenge in ancient DNA research is massive microbial DNA contamination from the deposition site which accumulates post mortem in the study organism’s remains. Two simple and cost-effective methods to enrich the relative endogenous fraction of DNA in ancient samples involve treatment of sample powder with either bleach or Proteinase K pre-digestion prior to DNA extraction. Both approaches have yielded promising but vary-ing results in other studies. Here, we contribute data on the performance of these methods using a comprehensive and systematic series of experiments applied to a single ancient bone fragment from a giant panda (Ailuropoda melanoleuca).Results: Bleach and pre-digestion treatments increased the endogenous DNA content up to ninefold. However, the absolute amount of DNA retrieved was dramatically reduced by all treatments. We also observed reduced DNA damage patterns in pre-treated libraries compared to untreated ones, resulting in longer mean fragment lengths and reduced thymine over-representation at fragment ends. Guanine–cytosine (GC) contents of both mapped and total reads are consistent between treatments and conform to general expectations, indicating no obvious biasing effect of the applied methods. Our results therefore confirm the value of bleach and pre-digestion as tools in palaeog-enomic studies, providing sufficient material is available. T3 - Zweitveröffentlichungen der Universität Potsdam : Mathematisch-Naturwissenschaftliche Reihe - 715 KW - ancient DNA (aDNA) KW - bleach KW - pre-digestion KW - endogenous content KW - palaeogenomics KW - paleogenomics KW - next generation sequencing (NGS) KW - giant panda KW - Ailuropoda melanoleuca Y1 - 2017 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-428151 SN - 1866-8372 IS - 715 ER -