Obtaining information about functional details of proteins of extinct species is of critical importance for a better understanding of the real-life appearance, behavior and ecology of these lost entries in the book of life. In this chapter, we discuss the possibilities to retrieve the necessary DNA sequence information from paleogenomic data obtained from fossil specimens, which can then be used to express and subsequently analyze the protein of interest. We discuss the problems specific to ancient DNA, including miscoding lesions, short read length and incomplete paleogenome assemblies. Finally, we discuss an alternative, but currently rarely used approach, direct PCR amplification, which is especially useful for comparatively short proteins.
Keywords: Ancient DNA; Genome assembly; Mapping; Paleogenomics; Re-sequencing; Reference sequence; SRAssembler; Targeted assembly.
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