Filtering out the noise: metagenomic classifiers optimize ancient DNA mapping

Contamination with exogenous DNA presents a significant challenge in ancient DNA (aDNA) studies of single organisms. Failure to address contamination from microbes, reagents, and present-day sources can impact the interpretation of results. Although field and laboratory protocols exist to limit contamination, there is still a need to accurately distinguish between endogenous and exogenous data computationally. Here, we propose a workflow to reduce exogenous contamination based on a metagenomic classifier. Unlike previous methods that relied exclusively on DNA sequencing reads mapping specificity to a single reference genome to remove contaminating reads, our approach uses Kraken2-based filtering before mapping to the reference genome. Using both simulated and empirical shotgun aDNA data, we show that this workflow presents a simple and efficient method that can be used in a wide range of computational environments—including personal machines. We propose strategies to build specific databases used to profile sequencing data that take into consideration available computational resources and prior knowledge about the target taxa and likely contaminants. Our workflow significantly reduces the overall computational resources required during the mapping process and reduces the total runtime by up to ∼94%. The most significant impacts are observed in low endogenous samples. Importantly, contaminants that would map to the reference are filtered out using our strategy, reducing false positive alignments. We also show that our method results in a negligible loss of endogenous data with no measurable impact on downstream population genetics analyses.