HuConTest: Testing Human Contamination in Great Ape Samples

Abstract

Modern human contamination is a common problem in ancient DNA studies. We provide evidence that this issue is also present in studies in great apes, which are our closest living relatives, for example in noninvasive samples. Here, we present a simple method to detect human contamination in short-read sequencing data from different species: HuConTest. We demonstrate its feasibility using blood and tissue samples from these species. This test is particularly useful for more complex samples (such as museum and noninvasive samples) which have smaller amounts of endogenous DNA, as we show here.

Keywords: ancient DNA; contamination; fecal DNA; next-generation sequencing; nonhuman primates.