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Updated: Oct 7, 2025

Primer Extension Capture: Targeted Sequence Retrieval from Heavily Degraded DNA Sources
Published on: September 3, 2009
Additional evaluations show that specific BWA-aln settings still outperform BWA-mem for ancient DNA data alignment
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 .

