Contamination from present-day DNA is a fundamental issue when studying ancient DNA from historical or archaeological material, and quantifying the amount of contamination is essential for downstream analyses. We present AuthentiCT, a command-line tool to estimate the proportion of present-day DNA contamination in ancient DNA datasets generated from single-stranded DNA libraries. The prediction is based solely on the patterns of post-mortem damage observed on ancient DNA sequences. The method has the power to quantify contamination from as few as 10,000 mapped sequences, making it particularly useful for analysing specimens that are poorly preserved or for which little data is available.

中文翻译：

---

AuthentiCT：古代 DNA 损伤模型，用于估计当今 DNA 污染的比例

从历史或考古材料中研究古代 DNA 时，现代 DNA 的污染是一个基本问题，量化污染量对于下游分析至关重要。我们展示了 AuthentiCT，这是一种命令行工具，用于估计从单链 DNA 文库生成的古代 DNA 数据集中当今 DNA 污染的比例。该预测完全基于在古代 DNA 序列上观察到的死后损伤模式。该方法能够从少至 10,000 个映射序列中量化污染，使其特别适用于分析保存不佳或可用数据很少的样本。