Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Comparison Of Two Ancient Dna Extraction Protocols For Skeletal Remains From Tropical Environments, Maria A. Nieves-Colon, Andrew T. Ozga, William J. Pestle, Andrea Cucina, Vera Tiesler, Travis W. Stanton, Anne C. Stone

Biology Faculty Articles

Objectives

The tropics harbor a large part of the world's biodiversity and have a long history of human habitation. However, paleogenomics research in these climates has been constrained so far by poor ancient DNA yields. Here we compare the performance of two DNA extraction methods on ancient samples of teeth and petrous portions excavated from tropical and semi‐tropical sites in Tanzania, Mexico, and Puerto Rico (N = 12).

Materials and Methods

All samples were extracted twice, built into double‐stranded sequencing libraries, and shotgun sequenced on the Illumina HiSeq 2500. The first extraction protocol, Method D, was previously designed for …

Differential Preservation Of Endogenous Human And Microbial Dna In Dental Calculus And Dentin, Allison E. Mann, Susanna Sabin, Kirsten Ziesemer, Ashild J. Vagene, Hannes Schroeder, Andrew T. Ozga, Krithivasan Sankaranarayanan, Courtney A. Hofman, James A. Fellows Yates, Domingo C. Salazar-Garcia, Bruno Frohlich, Mark Aldenderfer, Menno Hoogland, Christopher Read, George R. Milner, Anne C. Stone, Cecil M. Lewis Jr., Johannes Krause, Corinne Hofman, Kirsten I. Bos, Christina Warinner

Biology Faculty Articles

Dental calculus (calcified dental plaque) is prevalent in archaeological skeletal collections and is a rich source of oral microbiome and host-derived ancient biomolecules. Recently, it has been proposed that dental calculus may provide a more robust environment for DNA preservation than other skeletal remains, but this has not been systematically tested. In this study, shotgun-sequenced data from paired dental calculus and dentin samples from 48 globally distributed individuals are compared using a metagenomic approach. Overall, we find DNA from dental calculus is consistently more abundant and less contaminated than DNA from dentin. The majority of DNA in dental calculus is …