Few Clues About African Ancestry To Be Found In Mitochondrial DNA

ScienceDaily ^ | October 14, 2006 | BioMed Central / Reuters

[SunkenCiv]

Mitochondrial DNA may not hold the key to your origins after all.

A study published in the open access journal BMC Biology reveals that fewer than 10% of African American mitochondrial DNA sequences analysed can be matched to mitochondrial DNA from one single African ethnic group. There has been a growing interest in the use of mitochondrial DNA to trace maternal ancestries, and several companies now offer to analyse individuals' mitochondrial DNA sequences to obtain information about their origins. The current study suggests that only one in nine African Americans may be able to find clues about where their ancestors came from, in their mitochondrial DNA.

Bert Ely, from the University of North Carolina, and colleagues from other Universities in the USA analysed a database of the human variable region, or HVS-1 region, of mitochondrial (mt) DNA sequences from sub-Saharan Africa. They then compared two samples of African American mt DNA sequences to the database, to identify exact matches to the sub-Saharan sequences.

Ely et al.'s results show that more than half of the African American HSV-1 sequences were found in many different sub-Saharan ethnic groups. Forty percent of the African American HSV-1 sequences did not match any sequences in the database and fewer than 10% were an exact match to a sequence from a single African ethnic group.

[SunkenCiv]

[Article: African-American mitochondrial DNAs often match mtDNAs found in multiple African ethnic groups Bert Ely, Jamie L Wilson, Fatimah Jackson and Bruce A Jackson BMC Biology 2006, in press]

[SunkenCiv]

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[neverdem]

thanks, bfl

[pabianice]

Adds to the theory that mankind evolved separately in many different groups.

[pabianice]

Adds to the theory that mankind evolved separately in many different groups. Or that mankind is Out Of Europe, not Africa.

[wolfcreek]

“Or that mankind is Out Of Europe, not Africa.”

Or the Americas. My Wife thinks Taos, NM. is where it started around here.

[pby]

ping

[pby]

The folks at Darwin Central have some explaining to do.

[martin_fierro]

	Genetic Genealogy
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[Jeff Chandler]

I don’t believe it. I suspect that the electropherogram printout was Photoshopped.

[jas3]

The title of this post is very misleading. The actual article is here:

http://www.biomedcentral.com/1741-7007/5/13

And the thrust of the article is that the study shows MULTIPLE mtDNS matches from African Americans to African ethnic groups. Where the poster says “no single” that doesn’t mean no matches...it means multiple matches.

Also, this article is 2 years old. Why bump a non-controversial article about mtDNA now?

jas3

[VOA]

“
Few Clues About African Ancestry To Be Found In Mitochondrial DNA
“

Well, that’s gonna be a bummer for the high-profile African-Americans
that were told what their DNA said about them in regard to their parentage
on PBS’s “African American Lives 2”.

It was interesting to see how many of them were somewhat bummed out
to find they didn’t have Native-American heritage, despite their family histories.

And the host Henry Louis Gates, Jr. took his parentage read-out
in good spirits...
especially when he was told he a substantial contribution from some
Irish forbearor(s).
Gates started laughing when he realized he could tell folks that he,
the “black guy” that headed Harvard’s African-Americans studies,
was about half-white.
And half-Irish at that.

http://www.pbs.org/wnet/aalives/

[SunkenCiv]

Why pick controversial and unvetted Sarah Palin as a running mate? :’) The article never got posted at the time. Thanks for that link:

[snip] However, the only major change was that there were a number of matches of African-American sequences to sequences in the mislabelled data set. Thus, the number of African-American matches to single ethnic groups dropped from a total of 16 to 9 (Table 3) representing just 5% of the African American sequences that we compared to the database. [end]

http://www.biomedcentral.com/1741-7007/5/13