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Pea Plants And Genealogy

February 11th, 2008 Subscribe To Our Feed

Why Peas Are Important To Genetic Genealogy Methods

It was an obscure Austrian (now Czech Republic) priest who discovered the laws of inheritance and is known as “the father of modern genetics”. His name was Gregor Mendel and he did his groundbreaking work on genetics with the pea plant. As you may already know, even Darwin’s theory of evolution endorsed the common belief that pangenes (NOT!) were responsible for inheritance instead of Mendel’s model of inheritance. Both men lived during the same time in the 19th century. Mendel’s studies in genetics languished for over 50 years until they were “rediscovered” in the early 20th century.

Surname Testing

Starting in 1875, when George Darwin, a son of Charles Darwin, published a study using surnames to estimate the frequency of first-cousin marriages and calculated the expected incidence of marriage between people of the same surname to be between 2.25% and 4.5% for cousin marriages in the Great Britain population. The royals married their cousins inexorably. That’s why some of them are so crazy.

Phoenicians and Current Population of Malta

There have been many astonishing findings that show the link between the Phoenicians of ancient times with the present populace living in Malta. In addition, through genealogical DNA testing methods, it is possible to even trace over a longer period of time patterns of human migration and also find out when the first humans came to North America and even the means by which they arrived there.

Testing for Y-Chromosomes

This was a very innovative study for its time, and we had to wait till the nineties before locations on Y-chromosomes could be identified and put to use in order to trace inheritances between males. And, once genealogical DNA testing began to be widely available as well as affordable, genetic genealogy took off rapidly and by the year 2003 testing surnames through use of DNA was officially deemed to have arrived and there was a consequent increase in the number of companies that began to offer such tests, and consumers too began to avail themselves of such services in greater numbers.

Genetic Genealogy Acceptance

Genetic genealogy really came to be accepted when another milestone in the form of Genographic Project took place, which was a five-year project for researching genes that was undertaken by the National Geographic Society in combination with IBM. In the present times, there are two common forms of genetic genealogy tests which are Y-DNA or paternal line and the mtDNA or maternal line which are genealogical DNA tests that involve comparing certain sequences of DNA pairs of certain individuals with a view to estimating whether there is any possibility of their sharing common ancestry in genealogical time period.

Customers For Genetic Genealogy

Pea plants and Genealogy - who would have thunk it? Remember. Males should test for the Y-chromosome, which will point to their paternal forefathers. On the other hand, women can find out about their maternal ancestors via an mtDNA test, which deals with mitochondria. Annual sales of genetic genealogical tests topped $60 million in 2006