57
views
0
recommends
+1 Recommend
0 collections
    0
    shares
      • Record: found
      • Abstract: found
      • Article: not found

      Patterns of damage in genomic DNA sequences from a Neandertal.

      Read this article at

      ScienceOpenPublisherPMC
      Bookmark
          There is no author summary for this article yet. Authors can add summaries to their articles on ScienceOpen to make them more accessible to a non-specialist audience.

          Abstract

          High-throughput direct sequencing techniques have recently opened the possibility to sequence genomes from Pleistocene organisms. Here we analyze DNA sequences determined from a Neandertal, a mammoth, and a cave bear. We show that purines are overrepresented at positions adjacent to the breaks in the ancient DNA, suggesting that depurination has contributed to its degradation. We furthermore show that substitutions resulting from miscoding cytosine residues are vastly overrepresented in the DNA sequences and drastically clustered in the ends of the molecules, whereas other substitutions are rare. We present a model where the observed substitution patterns are used to estimate the rate of deamination of cytosine residues in single- and double-stranded portions of the DNA, the length of single-stranded ends, and the frequency of nicks. The results suggest that reliable genome sequences can be obtained from Pleistocene organisms.

          Related collections

          Author and article information

          Journal
          Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A
          Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
          Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
          0027-8424
          0027-8424
          Sep 11 2007
          : 104
          : 37
          Affiliations
          [1 ] Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Deutscher Platz 6, D-04103 Leipzig, Germany. briggs@eva.mpg.de
          Article
          0704665104
          10.1073/pnas.0704665104
          1976210
          17715061
          46000617-6542-4a32-8462-f9fe659d21bf
          History

          Comments

          Comment on this article