Additional evaluations show that specific BWA-aln settings still outperform BWA-mem for ancient DNA data alignment
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Updated: Oct 7, 2025

Primer Extension Capture: Targeted Sequence Retrieval from Heavily Degraded DNA Sources
Published on: September 3, 2009
Adrien Oliva1, Raymond Tobler1,2, Bastien Llamas1,2,3
1Australian Centre for Ancient DNA School of Biological Sciences Faculty of Sciences The University of Adelaide Adelaide South Australia Australia.
Abstract:
Xu et al. (2021) recently recommended a new parameterization of BWA-mem as a superior alternative to the widely-used BWA-aln algorithm to map ancient DNA sequencing data. Here, we compare the BWA-mem parameterization recommended by Xu et al. with the best-performing alignment methods determined in the recent benchmarks of Oliva and colleagues (2021), demonstrating that BWA-aln is still the gold-standard for ancient DNA read alignment .

