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bad credit payday The researchers next sieved out DNA fragments from two grams of fossil femur, collecting fragments that tended to consist of clumps of single-stranded DNA, rather than the long double strands that sequencing usually works best for. Still, with some creative tweaking, Meyer and his colleagues were able to get the sequencer to detect the samples. Along the way, they also had to deal with contamination from modern human DNA???from excavators and even the researchers themselves, despite their efforts to keep their work field sterile???a problem that plagues every study of ancient genetic material. Even with all that meticulous processing, in the end, Meyer estimates, ???there’s less than a 10th of the DNA of an ancient cell inside two grams of material.???