The efficacy of whole human genome capture on ancient dental calculus and dentin

Abstract

While ancient human dental calculus does contain endogenous human DNA sequences, their relative proportion is low when compared with other skeletal tissues. Whole genome enrichment can help increase the proportion of recovered human reads, but in this instance enrichment efficiency was relatively low when compared with other forms of capture. We conclude that further optimization is necessary before the method can be routinely applied to archaeological samples.