Tuesday 27 May 2008

genetics - What are Haplogroups?

I understand haplogroup as the group of people that share the same given haplotype for a region of the genome.
A haplotype is the readout of the DNA sequence for a part of the genome in one of the two copies that diploid organisms have. If you start reading the DNA sequence for a given point in the genome from one of your copies and someone else's copies, it will coincide up until a point where there is a change. It is more probable to have longer identical haplotypes if the two people that are compared are related. The closest the relation, the longer their haplotypes will be identical. What breaks haplotype identity are recombination events that happen in the germinal line in the previous generation, and mutations that happen both in the germinal line and the soma (the rest of your body) along time.

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