Nuclear insertions of mitochondrial DNA from Denisovans
A paper last week by Robert Bücking and coworkers trawled through the recently-sequenced Indonesian Genome Diversity Project dataset looking for snippets of ...
All posts tagged with mtDNA
The origin of the Africa-into-Neandertal mtDNA introgression hypothesis
I was reading through some papers for a post on neutral evolution versus selection in human diversification. That’s a topic I’ve written about several times,...
Tracing the users of chimpanzee tools by their DNA fingerprints
A new paper by Fiona Stewart and coworkers does a bit of forensic DNA analysis on tools made and used by chimpanzees: “DNA recovery from wild chimpanzee tool...
Short-faced bear convergence and the diversity of American extinct bears
A neat new paper by Kieren Mitchell and colleagues in Biology Letters has an mtDNA phylogeny for some extinct bears of the Americas. The main conclusion is t...
What sequences deserve a peer-reviewed publication?
David Roy Smith asks whether sequencing mitochondrial DNA is still worth a scientific paper: “Opinion: Too Many Mitochondrial Genome Papers”.
Notable: Inheritance of fitness in patrilineal societies
Notable paper: Heyer, E., Brandenburg, J.-T., Leonardi, M., Toupance, B., Balaresque, P., Hegay, T., Aldashev, A. and Austerlitz, F. (2015), Patrilineal popu...
Cave bear DNA from Sima de los Huesos
Jesse Dabney and colleagues, including Svante Pääbo from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, report on the assembly of a complete mitocho...
A mitochondrial DNA explainer video
mathbionerd author Melissa Wilson Sayres has put together a nice animated explainer about how mtDNA coalescence happens and why mtDNA is not the complete pic...
Cro-Magnon 1, dating and mtDNA
I’m running through the new paper from Qiaomei Fu and colleagues Fu:revised:2013 about Upper Paleolithic mtDNA genomes. Probably several readers were wonderi...
Mitochondria from another mother
This seems a newsworthy story by Ian Sample at the Guardian: “Britain ponders ‘three-person embryos’ to combat genetic diseases”.
Mailbag: Denisovan diversity
I just watched the National Geographic documentary "Sex in the Stone Age" and was surprised by the reference to the discovery of a 2nd Denisovan tooth, one w...
Polar bear mtDNA replacement
Jerry Coyne uses the occasion of polar bear genetics to give a biology lesson I’ve been trying to teach for 15 years: “A new study of polar bears underlines ...
The H preparation
Razib Khan comments on the current round of Henry Louis Gates ancestry programming: “Finding fake roots”, and “Reification is alright by me! Razib notes that...
Taking the mtDNA pulse of Neandertal populations
Neandertals have strikingly limited genetic variation. They once lived across a range from Spain to Siberia. Yet when we compare sequences across their whole...
Aleut origins and relationships
Michael Balter last week had a news article in Science reviewing archaeological and genetic research into the origins and relationships of Aleut populations ...
Mailbag: mtDNA ancestor and speciation?
I've got a question about something I wrote in a newsgroup in 1995. Okay, that doesn't sound overly urgent, right? The general subject has come up again fo...
Founder effect
A founder effect is caused by genetic drift in a small number of initial founders of a new population.
The sign of four
Gene Expression this morning is worth some thought, a post about the mtDNA of Andaman Islanders and their connections to mainland Asian populations. “Present...
Agriculture, population expansion and mtDNA variation
Earlier this spring, I wrote about a paper by Brenna Henn and colleagues that presented new data on SNP variation in recent African hunter-gatherer populatio...
Orangutan dynamics of Borneo
Bornean and Sumatran orangutans are the most highly divergent subspecies within any of the living species of great apes. The two farther apart even than chim...
Mitochondrial catchphrases
I love the first day of the month, because my web stats update at 3:00 am, giving me a more or less random midnight slice of my visitors. Over a longer time,...
Battlestar mitochondria
Wired has an interview with the authors of a book titled, The Science of Battlestar Galactica. I wasn’t a viewer of the show, so I wasn’t aware that the mito...
mtDNA, purifying selection and "distorted" genealogies
I’m going to pass along this paper without much comment, it’s by Jon Seger and colleagues and it came out earlier this year in Genetics Seger:2010:
Positive selection on killer whale mtDNA
I’ve written about the study of selection on human mtDNA many times, and discussed the signs that Neandertal mtDNA may have disappeared because of selection.
French Neolithic discontinuities
Marie-France Deguilloux and colleagues Deguilloux:2010 present a short analysis of ancient mtDNA recovered from a Neolithic burial at Prissé-la-Charrière, be...
Mailbag: mtDNA "out of whack"
Re: “Time to revise the mtDNA timescale?”:
Time to revise the mtDNA timescale?
Krzysztof Cyran and Marek Kimmel (2010) have presented a revised set of estimates of the human mtDNA most recent common ancestor (MRCA). It’s an interesting...
Libidinous Neandertal men and the women who loved them
I keep seeing people, who really ought to know better, saying that the new Neandertal genome results show that the gene flow must have been Neandertal men ma...
More X-Woman thoughts
I had a great session with my advanced students yesterday running through different evolutionary scenarios for the X-Woman. This and some later posts will fo...
African-American mtDNA and regional populations of Africa
I’m attending a symposium on genetics and genealogy of the African Diaspora this morning. Fatimah Jackson is here giving a very interesting talk about her ge...
Darwin's mitochondria
I’m always skeptical when pathologists attempt to diagnose the ills of historical figures. Even if there are medical records or abundant attestations of symp...
Mailbag: mtDNA mutation rates
Regarding frozen penguin mtDNA and mutation rates:
Ancient penguin mtDNA and substitution rates
Here’s an example of a really incomprehensible press release:
Kipunji introgression
So what’s the baboon DNA doing in that rare monkey species, anyway?
The Finnish line
A new paper by Jukka Palo and colleagues investigates the population history of Finland:
When history gets complicated
Razib posts some thoughts on how the study of human migration history has gotten more and more complex during the last fifteen years.
"The worm in the fruit of the mitochondrial DNA tree"
François Balloux (2009) has a polemic in the online access area of Heredity presenting references about mtDNA selection, and arguing that the use of this sin...
Today's Europeans different from Paleolithic and Neolithic predecessors
Dienekes, on a new study of early Neolithic and earlier mtDNA variation in Europe:
Mitochondrial DNA and sperm
Tuesday, I referred to mtDNA and sperm evolution. The topic was covered in some detail in a 2004 review paper by Neil Gemmell and colleagues, entitled, “Moth...
Mitochondrial DNA selection review
I was reading through an excellent review of the recent literature about mtDNA and selection, from Damian Dowling and colleagues (2008). The review focuses o...
mtDNA selection in Iceland?
Leave it to me to have readers unwilling to ignore selection in recent populations! Here’s an e-mail:
Genetic drift eliminated rare mtDNA haplotypes from Iceland
How powerful has genetic drift been in recent human evolution? That’s the question I raised the other day with reference to the claim that a heart disease ri...
Double the migrations, double the fun
Several news stories have reported on an article by Ugo Perego and colleagues, titled “Distinctive Paleo-Indian Migration Routes from Beringia Marked by Two ...
Glucose metabolism and memory
Roni Caryn Rabin reports on a study linking blood glucose spikes to age-related memory decline:
The unbearable hotness of Neandertals
According to the Telegraph (UK), Neandertals became extinct because their mitochondria leaked excess heat:
Poor tzi's doomed mitochondria
I must have seen a dozen stories today that started this way:
Sample sizes and the "Neandertal haplogroup"
I have an excellent e-mail question about last week’s Neandertal mtDNA paper, which has provoked a lot of commentary.
The mtDNA sequence of Paglicci 23
Is there anything surprising about finding the Cambridge Reference Sequence in Paglicci 23?
Were ancient Africans divided into small, isolated bands?
Last week when I wrote about the study of African mtDNA variation by Behar and colleagues, I focused on the issue of population size. To me, that must be th...
As far as cladistics can take mtDNA analysis
In the early access online edition of Genetics, there is a new paper by Toomas Kivisild and (many) colleagues, titled "The role of selection in the evolutio...
The Neandertal mtDNA story: 2004 edition
Note: I wrote this post in 2005. We have learned vastly more about Neandertal genetics since then. These two papers are important to the history of discoveri...