DNA Degradation: Current Knowledge and Progress in DNA Analysis

The field of palaeogenetics has not only contributed to our understanding of DNA degradation, but also to the development of sensitive methodologies to analyse genetic variation in degraded DNA. This chapter focuses on the processes involved in the degradation of DNA, and highlights the methodological advances that have taken place or might be promising in the future for the analysis of degraded DNA. Several efforts have been addressed to study in vitro chemical processes responsible for DNA degradation in order to model diagenetic trajectories. Given the extreme DNA degradation of aDNA samples, target enrichment methods will probably pave the way to the analysis of degraded DNA samples in a forensic identification. Future methodologies for analysing degraded DNA samples will still rely on advanced high-throughput sequencing (HTS) methods, either with or without a DNA repair protocol prior to the analysis.