Molecular Archeology of Ancient Bone From 400 Year Old Shipwreck

Molecular archeology is a new frontier of ancient archeology. Studies involving molecular archeology can give extra information useful to interpret our past. Ancient DNA basically consists of small DNA fragments that survive for a very long period. This DNA can be used as a template to study molecular archeology. We were able to isolate ancient mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) from bones that were recovered by the Department of Museum and Antiquity Malaysia during their Wanli's shipwreck excavation project recently. The amount of recovered mtDNA was very small; extracted bone showed there was no DNA band after agarose electrophoresis. Amplification using PCR approach at D-loop I of human mitochondrial DNA was able to produce the amplified DNA of 239bp in size. However, only 215 nucleic acids sequences were able to be confirmed when subjected to DNA sequencing procedures. Further analysis of the DNA sequenced of this amplified DNA showed that 99% of the gener - ated sequenced was identical with D-loop region I of human mitochondrial DNA. The results showed that our procedure of DNA extraction although produces very low amount of DNA but yields pure DNA that can be used for further analysis such as PCR amplification and DNA sequencing.