Abstract

Economic Ancient DNA Sequencing Analysis of ancient DNA is often limited by the availability of ancient material for sequencing. Briggs et al. (p. 318 ; see the news story by Pennisi ) describe a method of ancient DNA sequence retrieval that greatly reduces shotgun sequencing costs while avoiding the many difficulties associated with direct PCR-based approaches. They generated five complete and one near-complete Neandertal mitochondrial DNA genomes, which would have been economically impossible with a simple shotgun approach. Analysis of these genomes shows that Neandertal populations had a much smaller effective population size than modern humans or great apes.