Revising mtDNA haplotypes of the ancient Hungarian conquerors with next generation sequencing

PLoS One. 2017 Apr 19;12(4):e0174886. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0174886. eCollection 2017.

Abstract

As part of the effort to create a high resolution representative sequence database of the medieval Hungarian conquerors we have resequenced the entire mtDNA genome of 24 published ancient samples with Next Generation Sequencing, whose haplotypes had been previously determined with traditional PCR based methods. We show that PCR based methods are prone to erroneous haplotype or haplogroup determination due to ambiguous sequence reads, and many of the resequenced samples had been classified inaccurately. The SNaPshot method applied with published ancient DNA authenticity criteria is the most straightforward and cheapest PCR based approach for testing a large number of coding region SNP-s, which greatly facilitates correct haplogroup determination.

Publication types

  • Historical Article

MeSH terms

  • Bone and Bones / chemistry
  • DNA, Ancient / analysis*
  • DNA, Mitochondrial / genetics*
  • DNA, Mitochondrial / history
  • Fossils
  • Haplotypes*
  • High-Throughput Nucleotide Sequencing / methods*
  • History, Medieval
  • Humans
  • Hungary
  • Molecular Typing / methods*
  • Paleontology*
  • Polymerase Chain Reaction
  • Polymorphism, Single Nucleotide
  • Sequence Analysis, DNA

Substances

  • DNA, Ancient
  • DNA, Mitochondrial

Grants and funding

The generous support of Avicenna Foundation grant no. GF/JSZF/814/9/2015 to I.R. and encouragement of professor Miklos Maroth is highly appreciated. This research was also supported in part by OTKA NN 78696. SeqOmics Biotechnology Ltd. IN was supported by the János Bolyai Research Scholarship of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Hereby we certify that this company did not provide any funding for our study, they simply performed NGS sequencing services, and had consulting roles. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.