Exploring the Past Biosphere of Chew Bahir/Southern Ethiopia: Cross-Species Hybridization Capture of Ancient Sedimentary DNA from a Deep Drill Core

In this study we characterized ancient sedimentary DNA from the Chew Bahir basin with the aim to better understand past environmental conditions in a region that plays a significant role in hominin evolution. Highly degraded sedaDNA was recovered from sediments from the tropical environment of the southern Ethiopian Chew Bahir basin. The DNA underwent direct shotgun sequencing and shotgun sequencing after target enrichment of the phylogenetic marker genes cox1 and rbcL from 199 species via DNA hybridization capture. Phylogenetic placement of the reads was performed after adapter-trimming and quality filtering. Assessment of the libraries with Hidden Markov Models revealed that target enrichment of cox1 and rbcL did result in a larger fraction of reads that were identified as originating from these genes.