Supplementary Figure 1: A method for the temperature-controlled extraction of DNA from ancient bones

Supplementary Figure 1 Performance of two DNA extraction protocols for the purification of DNA from phosphate fractions obtained through incubation at room-temperature (21 °C) and 90 °C incubation. Phosphate fractions were obtained from the whale bone using the Supplementary Protocol. DNA was extracted from each fraction using two binding buffer options (‘G’ and ‘D’; [1]). Whereas both binding buffers yielded similar quantities of endogenous DNA (left panel), binding buffer ‘D’ resulted in a skew towards sequences from longer fragments (right panel), especially when applied to the 90 °C phosphate fraction, indicating a loss of short single-stranded DNA molecules. We therefore used binding buffer ‘G’ in all further experiments.