I have always had an interest in genealogy and now with modern tests you can test your genome to track your ancestry, but what do these haplogroups tell you about yourself?
In: Biology
If you are male, you received a Y chromosome from your father. And that was a copy of his chromosome, which was a copy of his father’s, and his father’s, and so on. Unless there was a mutation error, so that a man with a section of genetic code saying “AGAGTCTC” ended up giving one his sons “AGA**T**TCTC” instead.
By looking at the Y-chromosomes men around the world have, how different from each other they are, and where they are the same, we can build up a possible branching family tree of groups of men who must have shared a great-great-great…-grandfather. We call this a haplogroup. If you’re in the same haplogroup with a bunch of men currently living in Russia, you probably have Russian ancestry!
The same principle can also apply to everyone, male or female, because the DNA in the mitochrondia of our cells comes only from our mother. So you build up a tree of how groups of people with the same or similar mDNA shared great-great-great…-grandmothers with others in their haplogroup.
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