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Friday, 18 November 2011

Indian mitochondrial DNA haplogroups

Last Saturday I was honoured to be invited to give a lecture on DNA testing at the Families in British India Society's Annual General Meeting. FIBIS members are particularly interested in mitochondrial DNA testing as the British men who lived in India often married local women. In many cases the only record of Indian ancestry will be found through a DNA test. FIBIS has just launched a new DNA project for its members at Family Tree DNA, and it will be very interesting to see what discoveries they make.

When preparing the presentation I was unable to find any reliable information on the distribution of mitochondrial DNA haplogroups in India. Family Tree DNA has the world's largest mtDNA database, and Eileen Krause very kindly searched the FTDNA database for me to compile statistics on the distribution of mtDNA haplogroups of known Indian origin. She has kindly given permission for me to reproduce the figures here. As Family Tree DNA is a commercial testing company it should be noted that their database is not necessarily representative, but these figures nevertheless give a good idea of the range of mtDNA haplogroups that are likely to be found in anyone of Indian ancestry.

Haplogroup
Percentage
M
51%
U
19%
R
12%
H
5%
HV
3%
W
3%
N
2%
C, F, K, J, T, A, D, L2, B, I, L0, L1, X
<1%

© Debbie Kennett 2011
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2 comments:

  1. Andrew Millard21 November 2011 at 19:35

    Entries 2-5 on a search of google scholar for 'mitochondrial dna india' look like they each try to give an overview of mtDNA diversity in India

    http://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?hl=en&q=mitochondrial+dna+india&btnG=Search&as_sdt=0%2C5&as_ylo=&as_vis=0

    All four are freely available.

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  2. Debbie Kennett22 November 2011 at 01:28

    Thanks Andrew for the link to those papers. I should have remembered to check Google Scholar. Most of the papers you found were in DNA terms quite old, they were using low-resolution tests and the sample sizes were quite small. Even though FTDNA's database is skewed towards people of Western European origin you probably get a better snapshot of mtDNA diversity from their database, especially as they do all the testing for the Genographic Project. The Genographic apparently have lots of papers in the pipeline and their database will eventually be put in the public domain.

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