Resolving the phylogenetic position of Darwin's extinct ground sloth (Mylodon darwinii) using mitogenomic and nuclear exon data.

ABSTRACT: Mylodon darwinii is the extinct giant ground sloth named after Charles Darwin, who first collected its remains in South America. We have successfully obtained a high-quality mitochondrial genome at 99-fold coverage using an Illumina shotgun sequencing of a 12 880-year-old bone fragment from Mylodon Cave in Chile. Low level of DNA damage showed that this sample was exceptionally well preserved for an ancient subfossil, probably the result of the dry and cold conditions prevailing within the cave. Accordingly, taxonomic assessment of our shotgun metagenomic data showed a very high percentage of endogenous DNA with 22% of the assembled metagenomic contigs assigned to Xenarthra. Additionally, we enriched over 15 kb of sequence data from seven nuclear exons, using target sequence capture

SUBMITTER: Delsuc F 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5966596 | biostudies-literature | 2018 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature