ArticleScientific reports2016
The efficacy of high-throughput sequencing and target enrichment on charred archaeobotanical remains.
Article in Scientific reports, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 13 papers.
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Who cites it
13 citing papers in PubMed, 52 citations in OpenAlex.
- Ancient wheat DNA: How and what for?Journal, genetic engineering & biotechnology · 2026Article
- Optimizing ancient DNA recovery from archaeological plant seeds.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Trends, stasis and trajectories for plant and animal domestications: possibilistic models alert on resource overexploitation.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Unraveling the diversity and cultural heritage of fruit crops through paleogenomics.Trends in genetics : TIG · 2024Review
- The untapped potential of macrofossils in ancient plant DNA research.The New phytologist · 2022Article
- Accurate classification of fresh and charred grape seeds to the varietal level, using machine learning based classification method.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- Ancient DNA analysis of food remains in human dental calculus from the Edo period, Japan.PloS one · 2020Article
- High-Throughput Sequencing-Based Investigation of Viruses in Human Cancers by Multienrichment Approach.The Journal of infectious diseases · 2019Article
- Paleogenomics: reconstruction of plant evolutionary trajectories from modern and ancient DNA.Genome biology · 2019Article
- Ancient DNA reveals the timing and persistence of organellar genetic bottlenecks over 3,000 years of sunflower domestication and improvement.Evolutionary applications · 2019Article
- On the origins and domestication of the olive: a review and perspectives.Annals of botany · 2018Review
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Authors and funding
5 authors at 3 institutions in 3 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The majority of archaeological plant material is preserved in a charred state. Obtaining reliable ancient DNA data from these remains has presented challenges due to high rates of nucleotide damage, short DNA fragment lengths, low endogenous DNA content and the potential for modern contamination. It has been suggested that high-throughput sequencing (HTS) technologies coupled with DNA enrichment techniques may overcome some of these limitations. Here we report the findings of HTS and target enrichment on four important archaeological crops (barley, grape, maize and rice) performed in three different laboratories, presenting the largest HTS assessment of charred archaeobotanical specimens to date. Rigorous analysis of our data - excluding false-positives due to background contamination or incorrect index assignments - indicated a lack of endogenous DNA in nearly all samples, except for one lightly-charred maize cob. Even with target enrichment, this sample failed to yield adequate data required to address fundamental questions in archaeology and biology. We further reanalysed part of an existing dataset on charred plant material, and found all purported endogenous DNA sequences were likely to be spurious. We suggest these technologies are not suitable for use with charred archaeobotanicals and urge great caution when interpreting data obtained by HTS of these remains.
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