Impact of enrichment conditions on cross-species capture of fresh and degraded DNA

By combining high-throughput sequencing with target-enrichment (“hybridization capture”), researchers are able to obtain molecular data from genomic regions of interest for projects that are otherwise constrained by sample quality (e.g. degraded and contamination-rich samples) or a lack of a priori sequence information (e.g. studies on non-model species). Despite the use of hybridization capture in various fields of research for many years, the impact of enrichment conditions on capture success are not yet thoroughly understood. We evaluated the impact of a key parameter – hybridization temperature – on the capture success of mitochondrial genomes across the carnivoran family Felidae. Capture was carried out for a range of samples types (fresh, archival, ancient) with varying levels of sequence divergence between bait and target (i.e. across a range of species) using pools of individually indexed libraries on Agilent SureSelect arrays. Our results suggest that hybridization capture prot...