Tracing Ancestry

Representative Trantis said:

For males the mother's ancestry can be traced via the mitochondriam, as they are inherited from
the mother alone.

Their paternity can be traced back many many generations through their Y chromosome.

Can a female's paternal hancestry be traced in any way?

If you have the father, yes. If not, it might be possible, but it's not easy, as you have to
reconstruct the whole family tree (I can't see any genetic alternative to having to do this). We
ahve a guy worknig on this problem, it gets complicated because there are so many possible
pedigrees, and the data is often not good enough to be able to work out the pedigree precisely,
especially if you're going back more than a few generations.

Bob

--
Bob O'Hara

Rolf Nevanlinna Institute
P.O. Box 4 (Yliopistonkatu 5) FIN-00014 University of Helsinki Finland Telephone: +358-9-191 23743
Mobile: +358 50 599 0540 Fax: +358-9-191 22 779 WWW: rni.helsinki.fi~bohOpen ↗

In article <[email hidden]>,

Representative Trantis said:

For males the mother's ancestry can be traced via the mitochondriam, as they are inherited from the
mother alone.

Their paternity can be traced back many many generations through their Y chromosome.

Can a female's paternal hancestry be traced in any way?

It is a bit of a myth that maternal ancestries "can be traced via the mitochondrion". My mother and
her sister had the same mitochondrial haplotype (I assume). That means you couldn't tell from that
which of them was my mother. Similarly for my grandfather and his brother, who carried the same Y
chromosome.

You actually have to use non-Y, non-mitochondrial markers to infer ancestors. Lots and lots of them.

--
Joe Felsenstein [email hidden] Department of Genome Sciences, University of
Washington, Box 357730, Seattle, WA 98195-7730 USA

Quoted message said:

In article said:

For males the mother's ancestry can be traced via the mitochondriam, as they are inherited from
the mother alone.

Their paternity can be traced back many many generations through their Y chromosome.

Can a female's paternal hancestry be traced in any way?

It is a bit of a myth that maternal ancestries "can be traced via the mitochondrion". My mother and
her sister had the same mitochondrial haplotype (I assume). That means you couldn't tell from that
which of them was my mother. Similarly for my grandfather and his brother, who carried the same Y
chromosome.

You actually have to use non-Y, non-mitochondrial markers to infer ancestors. Lots and
lots of them.

You also have to consider that you have two parents, four grandparents, etc. In ten generations, you
had over a a thousand ancestors, in twenty over a million. Even accounting for substantial
inbreeding, you certainly had a large number of ancestors. Tracing the mitochondrial genes and the Y
chromosome would only give you two of these. It is even possible that you carry absolutely NONE of
the autosomal chromosomes of the two individuals you trace that way.

Mitochondrial and Y chromosome tracing have signiicant value for many purposes, but for tracing what
we, in ordinary language, call "ancestry", they really aren't that useful.