Human Mitochondrial DNA Testing Can Find Ancestors

Human Mitochondrial DNA Testing Can Find Ancestors

How far can you look into your family's past? Would you like to be able to look farther, with greater accuracy? With human mitochondrial DNA testing it is possible.

Human mitochondrial DNA is a unique form of organelle found in the cytoplasm of cells. Each cell in the human body has mitochondria. These tiny bits of tissue can only be seen under intense magnification, but they perform many important functions for the body. For testing purposes, their key feature is the way they are passed down through families.

While most people think of DNA testing as being used to prove paternity, mitochondrial testing is used to prove maternity. This is because mitochondria are passed down from mother to child. In fact, for many years, mitochondria were colloquially known as maternal DNA. The more identical a set of DNA is to another, the more closely a pair is related.

As a result, when tracing family trees and ancestral roots, maternal DNA becomes very important. While males can wonder if a child is theirs, a woman knows a child is hers. Tracing parentage up through mothers therefore yields greater accuracy in an ancestral search than tracing up through assumed fathers, as these can lead to genetic missteps and blind alleys.

Further, using mitochondrial strains, regional roots can also be verified. Since the similarity in mitochondrial patterns between family members is strong and persists between generations, similarities can be used to answer questions of origin such as whether or not great-grandparents came from Portugal or Pakistan.

Even more subtle regional discernments can be made. There has been a lot of publicity about former slaves using mitochondrial testing to determine which area of Africa or the Near East was their true home. This can help establish tribal identities and re-create a sense of ethnicity and place that the slave trade stripped away all those years ago.

The best part of all of this is that no matter what legends may exist in your family, mitochondria cannot tell a lie. You will be able to find out once and for all if you are rebel royalty, or if great-grandmother's claims of Asian ancestry were true or false. In this way and many others, human testing of mitochondria is a very useful endeavor.

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