Your Dad would be the interesting one, in that you may be the originator of the mutation to 11 at marker 4. It seems that some lines mutate much faster than others. A-4 shows quite a few mutations within a little over 200 years while there are participants in A-1a and A-1b who show no mutations in the same time frame. I would also suggest that the rate of mutation at each marker may change depending on where in the range of repetitions possible a particular result is located i.e. if it is the highest or lowest number of repetitions possible it might mutate more readily toward the center of the range than a center value would mutate toward the extreme. A center value may mutate very, very rarily. So is the marker stable or unstable? and what rate of mutation should be assigned to it? This latter could be why we have parallel mutations to11 at marker 4 even though it is supposedly a stable marker. The value of 12 is the top of the range. There is still a lot to be learned. Sue Liedtke ----- Original Message ----- From: "Norman Kincaide" <norman.kincaide@yahoo.com> To: <kincaid@rootsweb.com> Sent: Wednesday, September 24, 2008 5:29 PM Subject: [KINCAID] mutations Thanks so much, Sue, for your patience and explanation. I have been in contact with another descendant of Martin Kincaid and I have mentioned to him about the DNA test but I have not heard back from him. What I see out of this is that there appears to be more mutations (more or less random) within a ten to twelve generation period than I have understood to be (1 in 30 to 40 generations is what I have read). And there are the fast moving markers and the slow moving markers. It would be interesting to have my brothers, my two Kincaide nephews and my older brother's Kincaide grandsons and my Dad tested to see what the result would be. From the previous discussions I would bet money that there would be mutations within the span of 4 generations within a population of 8 male Kincaides, myself included. Since this process is only about ten years old there is much more to be done toward refining the results and understanding mutations. Sincerely Norman Kincaide To see the Kincaid of all spellings DNA chart in Excel: http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.com/~adgedge/Research/April%202004/Kincaid%20%20DNA.xls-------------------------------To unsubscribe from the list, please send an email toKINCAID-request@rootsweb.com with the word 'unsubscribe' without the quotesin the subject and the body of the message