This is a Message Board Post that is gatewayed to this mailing list. Author: ksaxe Surnames: McConnell, MacDonald, McDonald Classification: queries Message Board URL: http://boards.rootsweb.com/surnames.mcconnell/2453/mb.ashx Message Board Post: More on haplogroups and how DNA testing tells us about them My earlier post about Ray McConnell's DNA test results placing him in a group called Haplogroup I left out a lot of technical details. The 3 DNA Explained pages on the project website do an excellent job of explaining these ideas in detail and I recommend them highly. Of those three pages, the one most relevant to the subject of haplogroups is Doug's DNA page 1 at http://dna-project.clan-donald-usa.org/DNAdna2.htm. You can understand DNA test results and how they tell us about haplogroups better if you know just a few of the key concepts that are discussed on the DNA pages. Once you understand these ideas, you can easily do some sleuthing on the internet and understand how different haplogroups split off from each other. First, DNA can be tested for more than one kind of mutation. A man joins the Clan Donald project by having his Y chromosome tested for a kind of mutation called a short tandem repeat (STR). Although looking at a man's test results for STR mutations can often be used to predict his haplogroup with a high degree of certainty, STR mutations are not what determines membership in a Y-DNA haplogroup. Haplogroups are defined by mutations called Unique Event Polymorphisms (UEPs). Many UEPs belong to a group called Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms (SNPs). These types of polymorphisms occur so rarely during the process of DNA replication that it is unlikely that a particular UEP occurring at a particular location on a man's Y chromosome will have ever occurred at the same site during human history. Therefore, any man carrying such a mutation is probably a descendant of one individual who generated that mutation. When those mutations have occurred in the past and the man who generated them left male line descendants whose numbers increased sufficiently, today's haplogroups were formed. By gathering and analyzing data on the UEPs of large numbers of men, scientists have been able to sort them into different haplogroups and even tell which haplogroups contained the ancestors of men in more recently formed haplogroups. Members of haplogroups of recent origin carry the ! UEPs of their ancestral haplogroups, along with more recent UEPs unique to their haplogroup. Haplogroups split off into subgroups as more UEPs occur. When a man's haplogroup is identified, he is linked to a whole sequence of UEPs and the men who generated and carried them. Because each haplogroup originated with an individual, the STR test values for the members of a haplogroup will be somewhat similar to the STR values of the men who originated the haplogroup. There will be some "genetic drift" of those values over time, which tends to further separate the STR values of the men in the haplogroup from the STR values of the men in other haplogroups. This is why a testing company can usually predict the haplogroup of a man from STR test results. Ray's haplogroup was determined in this way, not by testing his UEPs. UEP names gneerally start with a letter followed by a number. Examples of names of UEPs include M170, P38, S31, S23, and M223. These UEPs are all shared by members of Ray's haplogroup. The International Society of Genetic Genealogy (ISOGG) website has pages for each Y-DNA haplogroup. You can look at ISOGG's family tree diagram for Haplogroup I at http://www.isogg.org/tree/ISOGG_HapgrpI07.html. You will be able to find the mutations listed above in the diagram and see how the various subgroups have developed. Scrolling down to the bottom of the page takes you to a nice description of the group. Once you have explored the tree for Haplogroup I, you can explore the Y DNA tree trunk at http://www.isogg.org/tree/ISOGG_YDNATreeTrunk07.html. There you can see how Group I developed from a group called IJ, which in turn developed from Group F, and so on. To learn more about these ancestral groups, you can just go to their headings on the tree trunk diagram and click. By the use of these sites, links from them, and search engines, it is easy to find further information on haplogroups. Wikipedia has some very interesting articles about this and related subjects. When a man receives results of his initial STR test, the testing company usually includes a prediction of what haplogroup a test of his UEPs would place him in. If the man wants to confirm his haplogroup or learn more specific information about what subgroup he belongs to, he can usually obtain further information by ordering a UEP test. Different companies have different versions of these tests, and the tests are changing as new UEPs are discovered and studied. Anyone interested in such testing is advised to contact the project administrators for advice before ordering a test. Because there are so many Haplogroup R1b men in the project, the administrators want to work closely with them on their haplogroup testing, with a goal of using subgroups to help sort out the R1b men. So for these men, it is particularly important to contact one of the administrators first. They are Mark MacDonald at mark@macdonaldlaw.com and Doug McDonald at mcdonald@scs.uiuc.edu. ************************************************************************* The haplogroups we have been discussing are all based on a male's male line ancestry. The mitochondrial DNA that all people inherit from their mothers may also be used to sort them into haplogroups based on their maternal line ancestry. The "Seven Daughters of Eve" that you may have heard about are the progenitors of the seven mitochondrial DNA haplogroups for European maternal lines. These haplogroups are another fascinating subject, but the Y-DNA tests used by the Clan Donald project do not reveal anything about the members' mitochondrial DNA haplogroups, and the results of mitochondrial DNA testing do not tell us anything about Clan Donald's Y-DNA lines. Important Note: The author of this message may not be subscribed to this list. If you would like to reply to them, please click on the Message Board URL link above and respond on the board.