Has there been nobody related to me for 10,000 years?

[ahamilton]

So my husband and I have our full-blown tests done.

He gets 734 matches and some fairly close. We haven't had a chance yet to contact these people to see if we can find out more about his biological father. Hopefully I'll be able to post a success story someday.

Anyway, my question is why do I have zero matches? None. Did my mother's people all stay in Karlsruhe and Baden-Baden and park their teutonic DNA in one place for 10,000 years and nobody from this small area has ever been tested?

I find this both odd, interesting, and irritating.

Anybody know? Thanks!

Cheers, Ann

[tomcat]

...
Anyway, my question is why do I have zero matches? None. Did my mother's people all stay in Karlsruhe and Baden-Baden and park their teutonic DNA in one place for 10,000 years and nobody from this small area has ever been tested?

I find this both odd, interesting, and irritating.

Anybody know? Thanks!
...

Ann,

Have you posted your mtDNA to Mitosearch where near-matches are shown? You might find near-matches confirming of your known ancestry.

[GhostX]

So my husband and I have our full-blown tests done.

He gets 734 matches and some fairly close. We haven't had a chance yet to contact these people to see if we can find out more about his biological father. Hopefully I'll be able to post a success story someday.

Anyway, my question is why do I have zero matches? None. Did my mother's people all stay in Karlsruhe and Baden-Baden and park their teutonic DNA in one place for 10,000 years and nobody from this small area has ever been tested?

I find this both odd, interesting, and irritating.
Anybody know? Thanks!

Cheers, Ann

Ann,

I presume you are talking about mtDNA test results (you must be). You didn't mention what level of testing you had done (HVR1/HVR2/FGS), but using myself as an example, I have tons of HVR1 matches (these won't even show up in your list of matches unless you have the option checked in your preferences), eight HVR1+HVR2 matches, and zero FGS matches.

Tomcat's suggestion to try Mitosearch is a good one, but keep in mind that a near-match in mitochondrial DNA probably doesn't mean much. Even a perfect match doesn't necessarily mean that you share any recent common ancestor with your matches, due to the slow mutation rate of mtDNA, unless you are talking about a perfect match with a FGS (full genome sequence) test. Y-DNA is a different story, and your husband will potentially see "matches" with people who aren't really that close a match.

When you run your search at Mitosearch, I would personally only really bother to consider people who show perfect matches (i.e., HVR1 and HVR2 Mutational Difference = 0, in the table of results). I actually didn't even bother contacting my perfect matches, because they were from the wrong countries, and therefore very unlikely to be able to match up with my paper trail. For all I know, I last shared a common ancestor with them over 1000 years ago.

Anyway, all it really means that you have no matches listed on your personal page at FTDNA is that you have at least one rare mutation, and not enough people have been tested yet to find somebody who shares that mutation. The number of testees is growing very rapidly though, so you could end up with a match before long.

[GhostX]

Ann,

I just re-read your post, and I noted that you said you had "full-blown" tests done. If you meant that you had the "mtDNA Full Sequence" (FGS) test done (the top-end mitochondrial DNA test), it's probably very unlikely that you'd get a perfect match. FTDNA only shows perfect matches for mtDNA on your personal page.

There are other ways you can look for close matches with a FGS test though, so if that's the one you had done, let us know and we can point you to some resources to try.

[jaynegen]

Tell me!

There are other ways you can look for close matches with a FGS test though, so if that's the one you had done, let us know and we can point you to some resources to try.

Tell me! I had the FGS done and would like to know where to find close matches. Thanks!

[GhostX]

Tell me! I had the FGS done and would like to know where to find close matches. Thanks!

Well, the first thing I would do is submit my FGS results to GenBank. Ian Logan can help you do this:

http://www.ianlogan.co.uk/Submission.htm

I would ask him to omit your name from the submission, in which case he will list Bennett Greenspan from FTDNA as the contact person (to preserve your anonymity, due to the potentially medically-sensitive nature of FGS results). Once your submission has been accepted and you are assigned an accession number, you can do a MegaBLAST search for similar sequences:

http://tinyurl.com/2kh4fb

In the meantime, you can research your mutations by going to the following websites:

http://www.mitomap.org/

http://www.genpat.uu.se/mtDB/

At the latter, you can look up how common your mutations are, one at a time, and get the GenBank accession numbers of people who share particular mutations (this can be useful when you have some very rare mutations).

Ian's Greasemonkey script can help you turn the cryptic GenBank sequences into a more readable list of mutations:

http://www.ianlogan.co.uk/scripts/greasemonkey.htm

I hope you find that info useful. Some of these sites are rather complicated to figure out, so just ask if anything is unclear.

[penguin]

Well, the first thing I would do is submit my FGS results to GenBank. Ian Logan can help you do this:

http://www.ianlogan.co.uk/Submission.htm

I would ask him to omit your name from the submission, in which case he will list Bennett Greenspan from FTDNA as the contact person (to preserve your anonymity, due to the potentially medically-sensitive nature of FGS results). Once your submission has been accepted and you are assigned an accession number, you can do a MegaBLAST search for similar sequences:

http://tinyurl.com/2kh4fb

In the meantime, you can research your mutations by going to the following websites:

http://www.mitomap.org/

http://www.genpat.uu.se/mtDB/

At the latter, you can look up how common your mutations are, one at a time, and get the GenBank accession numbers of people who share particular mutations (this can be useful when you have some very rare mutations).

-.

To be clear, you do NOT have to submit your results to GenBank in order to use the tinyurl site to search for similar sequences. You can just cut and paste your sequence in (or have it upload a file of your data from your computer)

Whether you'd like to submit or not submit your results to GenBank is a completely different issue. Disadvantage is that everyone on the planet will now have access to a result (that you payed for)-you have no control over your own data. Advantage is that researchers and others might make advances when sequences are posted. (If you do submit, instead of allowing someone else to be the contact person for what you own, an alternative is to use an alias, and to create a new email address for it).

On the genpat website, it's a great idea in principle. But the search results are out of date and/or do not retrieve all the relevent GenBank sequences. It currently is only returning sequences that have been up on GenBank for quite a long time.

[PDHOTLEN]

potential problem...

There could be inherited diseases and conditions related to one's mitochondrial FGS. I mean, you can look up online about such like, and if it your data were made public, revealing your full mito genome could be detrimental to anyone with a particular haplotype orhaplogroup sub-type connected to an embarassing pathology. But I'm no expert.

After reading the above paragraph, I'm confused. And I'm the one who wrote it - ha ha.

U5b2 & R1a1*

[TaiDuMei]

I belong to Haplogroup B, have no match either.