HyRAD-X, a versatile method combining exome capture and RAD sequencing to extract genomic information from ancient DNA

Over the last decade, protocols aimed at reproducibly sequencing reduced-genome subsets in non-model organisms have been widely developed. Their use is however limited to DNA of relatively high molecular weight. During the last year, several methods exploiting hybridization capture using probes based on RAD-sequencing loci have circumvented this limitation and opened avenues to the study of samples characterized by degraded DNA, such as historical specimens. Here, we present a major update to those methods, namely Hybridization capture from RAD-derived probes obtained from a reduced eXome template (hyRAD-X), a technique applying RAD-sequencing to messenger RNA from one or few fresh specimens to elaborate bench-top produced probes, i.e., a reduced representation of the exome, further used to capture homologous DNA from a samples set. In contrast to previous hybridization-capture methods, the reference catalog on which reads are aligned does not rely on de novo assembly of anonymous RAD-s...