DNA that survives in museum specimens, bones and other tissues recovered by archaeologists is invariably fragmented and chemically modified. The extent to which such modifications accumulate over time is largely unknown but could potentially be used to differentiate between endogenous old DNA and present-day DNA contaminating specimens and experiments. Here we examine mitochondrial DNA sequence...

Recent years have witnessed the rise of ancient DNA (aDNA) technology, allowing comparative genomics to be carried out at unprecedented time resolution. While it is relatively straightforward to use aDNA to identify recent genomic changes, it is much less clear how to utilize it to study changes in epigenetic regulation. Here we review recent works demonstrating that highly degraded aDNA still ...

Most reconstruction methods for genomes of ancient origin that are used today require a closely related reference. In order to identify genomic rearrangements or the deletion of whole genes, de novo assembly has to be used. However, because of inherent problems with ancient DNA, its de novo assembly is highly complicated. In order to tackle the diversity in the length of the input reads, we pro...

Ancestral genome reconstruction is an important step in analyzing the evolution of genomes. Recent progress in sequencing ancient DNA led to the publication of so-called paleogenomes and allows the integration of this sequencing data in genome evolution analysis. However, the assembly of ancient genomes is fragmented because of DNA degradation over time. Integrated phylogenetic assembly address...

Although the last few years have seen great progress in DNA sequence retrieval from fossil specimens, some of the characteristics of ancient DNA remain poorly understood. This is particularly true for blocking lesions, i.e. chemical alterations that cannot be bypassed by DNA polymerases and thus prevent amplification and subsequent sequencing of affected molecules. Some studies have concluded t...

Ancient human DNA has been treated cautiously ever since the problems related to this type of material were exposed in the early 1990s, but as sequential genetic data from ancient specimens have been key components in several evolutionary and ecological studies, interest in ancient human DNA is on the increase again. It is especially tempting to approach archaeological and anthropological quest...