How easy is to get your DNA sample contamination-free by isolating nuclei from dead cells in saliva?
How easy is to get your DNA sample contamination-free by isolating nuclei from dead cells in saliva?
and
"SNP genotyping results for saliva derived DNA (n = 39) illustrated a 98.7% concordance when compared with blood DNA. In conclusion, when compared with blood DNA and tested on the DMET array, saliva-derived DNA provided adequate genotyping quality with a significant lower number of SNP calls. Saliva-derived DNA does perform very well if it contains greater than 31.3% human amplifiable DNA." [2]
[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/309849150_Saliva_is...
Sequencing will run to a certain coverage (or depth), aligning multiple fragments so that each nucleotide is sampled e.g. 30 times, which would weed out contaminants. Saliva is generally considered 'good enough' (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3497576/)
They might just use an anti-microbial agent in their collection kit to prevent growth of bacteria until it reaches their lab (plus you don't want bacterial nucleases to fragment your DNA).