bioRxiv preprint doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.04.20.050369; this version posted May 28, 2020. The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not certified by peer review) is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under aCC-BY 4.0 International license. An open-sourced bioinformatic pipeline for the processing of Next-Generation Sequencing derived nucleotide reads: Identification and authentication of ancient metagenomic DNA Thomas C. Collin1, *, Konstantina Drosou2, 3, Jeremiah Daniel O’Riordan4, Tengiz Meshveliani5, Ron Pinhasi6, and Robin N. M. Feeney1 1School of Medicine, University College Dublin, Ireland 2Division of Cell Matrix Biology Regenerative Medicine, University of Manchester, United Kingdom 3Manchester Institute of Biotechnology, School of Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of Manchester, United Kingdom
[email protected] 5Institute of Paleobiology and Paleoanthropology, National Museum of Georgia, Tbilisi, Georgia 6Department of Evolutionary Anthropology, University of Vienna, Austria *Corresponding Author Abstract The emerging field of ancient metagenomics adds to these Bioinformatic pipelines optimised for the processing and as- processing complexities with the need for additional steps sessment of metagenomic ancient DNA (aDNA) are needed in the separation and authentication of ancient sequences from modern sequences. Currently, there are few pipelines for studies that do not make use of high yielding DNA cap- available for the analysis of ancient metagenomic DNA ture techniques. These bioinformatic pipelines are tradition- 1 4 ally optimised for broad aDNA purposes, are contingent on (aDNA) ≠ The limited number of bioinformatic pipelines selection biases and are associated with high costs.