Variation of the genotypes of the human MT chromosome

Question

[igorm]

Hi,

What is the variation of the genotypes of the chrMT between random individuals? I can't find a source on this topic.

I have been comparing 4 random unrelated samples and I get a concordance around ~99.5% when comparing the gt across the entire mt.

Is it reasonable to expect similar concordance with respect to Y chromosomes among unrelated samples?

Thanks.

Answer 1

[Gabriel R.]

There is no single answer, in a relatively "old" paper, back from 2000:

Mitochondrial genome variation and the origin of modern humans

I would look at Table 1, you have the ; MPSD, mean pairwise sequence difference, the result varies a lot depending on whether you look at Africans vs non-Africans and D-loop vs the rest of the mitogenome.

I am not an expert on the mutation rate on chrY but the rate of mutation is much lower for the Y.

Hope this helps!

[igorm]

Appreciate the answer. I looked at MPSD and for all humans and it is 61 pairwise differences on average across the entire mt, which makes it ~99.6% concordance. Thanks.