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.