Professor Angus Davison is a researcher at the University of Nottingham and a long-term customer of Novogene’s who recently had some ancient snail DNA from Hawaii sequenced in our Cambridge Sequencing Centre. The DNA had been stored for 60 years in pineapple-derived alcohol so Prof. Davison was not hugely hopeful about the quality of the extracted DNA, or whether any sequencing data would be obtained from it, but he was pleasantly surprised.

“I’ve done lots of sequencing with Novogene over the years and have always been happy with the data, but the results from this most recent sample were just fantastic. I was so impressed by Novogene’s ability to use routine methods to sequence amounts of DNA so small that other companies wouldn’t touch them.”

Prof. Davison used Novogene’s Plant & Animal Whole Genome Sequencing Service with a PE150 sequencing strategy on the Illumina NovaSeq 6000 platform, producing 5G of raw data per sample. Using this method, we were able to successfully obtain sequencing data from 1.9 ng of input DNA.

The DNA sequenced came from a snail specimen stored at the Bernice Bishop Museum in Hawaii that holds thousands of specimens of extinct and endangered snails. Despite the small size of the Hawaiian islands, they were home to over 750 species of snail, before recent extinctions. One of the projects Prof. Davison and his team are currently working on is to understand the radiation of these Hawaiian snails. Many are endangered so further study will facilitate their conservation.

“When we got the sequences back there was DNA from other species that had grown in the alcohol over time such as cyanobacteria, but I was able to isolate some mitochondrial DNA from the snail itself, a species that is completely extinct. There’s a lot of potential there in terms of understanding its evolutionary origins and radiation,” said Prof Davison.

Due to the contamination this sequencing run highlighted, Prof Davison and his team will now likely progress with designing a capture method for isolating the snail DNA from this specimen and others available, to make the process more cost efficient. We look forward to assisting Prof Davison with optimising the process and believe this to be an excellent example of how next-generation sequencing can contribute to important conservation efforts.