Application of next generation sequencing technologies to the identification of highly degraded unknown soldiers' remains

Complete genome studies performed with next generation sequencing technologies are becoming more and more abundant. The potential such technologies could have for DNA identification purposes are obvious, but so far, very few forensic laboratories have tested these new instruments. We decided to evaluate the Illumina GAIIx platform for sequencing mitochondrial DNA extracted from an ancient human bone. We show that using standard Illumina protocols, we obtained a very small coverage of the mtDNA genome and observe a high error rate of 1.44%. We therefore tested various methods to improve the quality and quantity of the data. This report will describe our results when we incorporated a DNA repair and a primer extension capture step in the protocol.