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From:
Subject: Re: [DNA] My mtDNA Oxford Results
Date: Thu, 6 Jun 2002 19:16:35 EDT
In a message dated 06/06/02 7:07:06 AM Pacific Daylight Time,
writes:
> Do the sequences in
> NCBI and Cambridge Reference Sequence refer to or present a single sequence
> from a single individual or some form of concensus sequence?
From Andrews' paper in Nature Genetics Oct 1999 p 147: "... the original
mtDNA sequence was principally derived from a single individual of European
descent, although it also contained some sequences from both HeLa cells and
bovine mtDNA."
The HeLa story is very interesting -- see
http://www.jhu.edu/~jhumag/0400web/01.html for a background essay. This is a
line of cells derived 50 years ago from an ovarian tumor in an
African-American woman, given the pseudonym Helen Lane and now known to be
Henrietta Lackey. It is a cell which is very easy to culture, and it's used
in many different kinds of experiments. It turns out that the control region
(also called the D-loop or hypervariable region) did come entirely from the
European sample, and it's in Haplogroup H. When HeLa cells are used in their
entirety, Henrietta can be assigned to Haplogroup L3b, which is indeed an
African pattern. (Hernstadt et al, Mutation Research April 2002 pp 19-28, "A
high frequency of mtDNA polymorphisms in HeLa cell sublines").
If you're interested in reading more about the methods used to piece together
a picture of human history from mtDNA, a good place to start would be an
editorial by Martin Richards and Vincent Macaulay "The Mitochondrial Gene
Tree Comes of Age." The full text, with hyperlinks for references, is online
at
http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/resolve?AJHG012838
Ann Turner
GENEALOGY-DNA List Administrator
http://lists.rootsweb.com/index/other/Miscellaneous/GENEALOGY-DNA.html
DNA preservation kits: http://www.dnafiler.com
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