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The current standard practice for assembling individual genomes involves mapping millions of short DNA sequences (also known as DNA ‘reads’) against a pre-constructed reference genome. Mapping vast amounts of short reads in a timely manner is a computationally challenging task that inevitably produces artefacts, including biases against alleles not found in the reference genome. This reference bias and other mapping artefacts are expected to be exacerbated in ancient DNA (aDNA) studies, which rely on the analysis of low quantities of damaged and very short DNA fragments (~30–80 bp). Nevertheless, the current gold-standard mapping strategies for aDNA studies have effectively remained unchanged for nearly a decade, during which time new software has emerged. In this study, we used simulated aDNA reads from three different human populations to benchmark the performance of 30 distinct …