Ancient DNA - Problems and Errors

Problems and Errors

aDNA may contain a large number of postmortem mutations, increasing with time. Some regions of polynucleotide are more susceptible to this degradation so sequence data can bypass statistical filters used to check the validity of data. Due to sequencing errors, great caution should be applied to interpretation of population size. Substitutions resulting from deamination cytosine residues are vastly overrepresented in the ancient DNA sequences. Miscoding of C to T and G to A accounts for the majority of errors.

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