MITOCHONDRIAL DNA HAPLOGROUP K SURVEY AT 500 ENTRIES ON MITOSEARCH
AS OF APRIL 13, 2006
This is my fifth survey of the mtDNA haplogroup K (Katrine’s Clan) entries on FamilyTreeDNA’s MitoSearch. The previous survey at 403 entries may be found at K403 Survey. There are several links on that page to the previous survey, to a chart of the high-resolution entries, and to a supplement on geographical considerations of the entries. I will not repeat everything discussed in those documents.
The K500 survey includes a new CHART, which is sorted by HVR2 then HVR1 mutations. It took five months for the entries to go from 100 to 200, but only five weeks to go from 400 to 500. At some point, I will start skipping the century marks for these surveys.
Only non-duplicated high-resolution or HVR1 plus HVR2 entries are included in this survey, in which are found 230 entries – or 46% of the total, only slightly higher than in the previous survey. Among those removed were 22 claiming to be CRS, or having no HVR1 mutations. That is highly unlikely for haplogroup K. None of the 230 included entries has fewer than three HVR1 mutations. I also removed one duplicate entry. Twenty-five of the remaining entries are marked Show, which means they have a pedigree chart on MitoSearch. The number of those testing outside FTDNA has not increased; all but five tested with FTDNA. There are still five fairly-obvious K’s under Unknown category at MitoSearch who tested with Relative Genetics. There are also five U5 entries and one U4 entry which may eventually be reclassified as K’s; some of those have perfect matches with K entries.
The 230 entries include 154 different haplotypes, for a 67% diversity. That’s a decrease from last time’s 78%. That means that new entries are becoming more likely to find matches. There are 123 “singleton” entries. Three haplotypes have eight examples, and two each have six and seven. For some reason, there are single sets of four and five examples. Four have three, and there 18 paired haplotypes. The multiple-entry haplotypes are easily found on the accompanying chart.
I have again assigned country codes to the entries based on
the listed country of origin. New countries this time are
I have used the same colors to mark certain mutations as in
the previous charts. Yellow denotes mutations 498- or 16320T, which probably
predict subclades K1c and K1c2. Green marks the various “Ashkenazi” mutations,
16223T, 16234T, 16524G, and 512C, as discussed in Dr. Doron Behar’s paper. Blue marks
497T, which starts all K1a and lower subclades.
In the previous geographical supplement, I had presented a
few apparent discoveries. The various “Ashkenazi” mutations occurred mostly in
those listing one of the
I had noticed that the 498- mutation without the 16320T
mutation – generally subclade K1c – was found only in those with origins from
the
The new feature on the accompanying chart with this survey
is three new charts at the bottom of the main chart. The first one is a bar
chart with the actual counts of the listed countries of origin for the 230
entries. To me, the main point visualized is the great number of K’s who are
brickwalled in the southeastern
All K’s who tested at FTDNA or who transfer their results from the National Geographic Society Genographic Project are welcome to join the mtDNA Haplogroup K Project. Further information is on our website. At 127 members, we remain the largest mtDNA haplogroup project.
Three caveats: One, usage of the term Ashkenazi to describe certain mutations or haplotypes does not mean that everyone with those mutations has Ashkenazi ancestors. Two, mention of subclades is for descriptive purposes only. Subclade definitions usually require a subclade test of the coding-region mutations outside the hypervariable regions (HVR) or a full-sequence test. As of now, FTDNA does not offer a subclade test for K. A few K’s have taken the expensive full-sequence test, but those results are not reflected in the data extracted from MitoSearch. Three, MitoSearch entries are of course USA-centric and are not necessarily representative of the world’s K population. However, MitoSearch probably has a better representation of British-origin K examples than other available studies.
William R. Hurst