jtb@phs.UUCP (11/10/83)
In refrence to: ^ A rather astonishing discovery was announced by Allan C. Wilson of UC ^ Berkeley at a meeting at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (NY) held in ^ August '83. Another group led by Luigi Cavalli-Sforza of Stanford has ^ verified this result. Briefly stated, their result is as follows: ^ ^ All living people (or at least ~99% of them) have a single common female ^ ancestor on their purely maternal line. In other words, tracing back to ^ one's mother's mother's mother's ... mother will bring everyone back to a ^ single individual woman. She is estimated to have lived between 50,000 and ^ 500,000 years ago. This is a result so remarkable I suspect a joke. Would someone please post a complete refrence to a published paper? Is the interpretation of one ancestor by the origional authors or the person who posted the item? There are other reasions besides common decent for many individuals to have the same allele at a given loci. For instance in man the genes for hemoglobin and cytochrome C both have a domanent allele which is found in more than 99% of individuals. This does not prove common decent but rather that those alleles are so favored by natural selection that the spread of alternate alleles created by mutation is prevented. There are ways of determining whether common decent is the explanation but I would like to see some more information in this case. BTW In case anyone on the net is wondering the statements in the origional article about maternal inheritance of mitocondria and their genes are correct. Jose Torre-Bueno Dept. of Physiology Duke U. Med. Center decvax!duke!phs!jtb
bb@lanl-a.UUCP (11/11/83)
Even taken as it stands, the discovery doesn't suprise me very much. At some time in the not too distant past homo sapiens emerged as a new species. There must have been just a couple of breeding females or so at one point. So it seems to be that if there were a great deal of variation among our mitochondria that that would be harder to explain, given that mitochondria are almost totally separate organisms, whose reproduction and replication mechanisms are rarely interfered with by 'our' DNA mechanisms. I would be interested in seeing a real reference. We will get it eventually (my group here collects all papers concerning DNA and all the journals) but I would like to know exactly what to ask the biologist-types here to look for. b2 Bryan Bingham ucbvax!lbl-csam!lanl-a!bb Los Alamos National Lab
phil@amd70.UUCP (11/18/83)
Am I supposed to believe someone so well educated he spells "descent"
as "decent"?
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Phil Ngai (408) 988-7777 {ucbvax|decwrl|ihnp4|allegra}!amd70!phil