1/16th? Where's the rest of your family?

     Today, didn't really do much that was exciting. I collected more DNA from people who couldn't make it to yesterday's event and who wanted to give up some DNA and participate in my study.  After this, I'm totally done swabbing! So If you wanted to participate, sorry it's too late now, but for anyone who is interested in participating in a larger scale version of what I'm doing, please visit The National Geographic's Genographic Project. I'm following a lot of what they're doing, but they'll furnish you with some official looking documents about your mitochondrial history. It's a really neat project, and I feel that it's a really important cultural thing to document, because who are we if we are not the sum of the evolution of our species? Anyway, enough of my soapbox preachings...
      After collecting all of my surveys, samples, and trying to keep everything in order, I finally got to enter most of my survey information. Most people who participated had followed the directions and filled out the survey correctly, but there were a few that were really funny to look at, and also partly frustrating.
     My survey is comprised of every possible category of people on the planet, and participants need only circle the ones that apply to them and estimate the percentage that this certain ethnic group makes up their entire heritage. Some of the results that I got were amusing. Most people on the surveys had forgotten that 'percent' adds up to 100, So I have surveys like "20% Chinese, 25% Irish*" and that would be it. And all I'm thinking is 'Ok, that's 45%, where's the other 55% of your survey? Are you part Alien?'. The best one was an example of this, but taken to the extreme. I read on a survey where this was the only entry: "1/16th Berber*". What the heck? Are there 1/16ths of people running around?

       I digress. Well, I've also been putting off doing actual lab work because of reasons discussed earlier. But tomorrow, I really have to start doing it. Although there's a step in my lab that requires putting my samples in a thermal cycler, which 'cooks' the DNA samples at different temperatures and different times, and that entire program takes 75 hours to complete. So I might wait until Thursday to actually do anything with my main samples and let everything cook and simmer over the weekend.
       Tomorrow I will get started on my own 'master' DNA. I'm using my own DNA as a test run and a comparative item, to see if I'm doing everything correctly.  One of my maternal cousins actually bought the kit from The National Geographic Genegraphic project, and with all of its bells and whistles, it includes her haplogroup and the actual haplotype sequence. My own mtDNA shouldn't be that different from hers as her maternal grandmother is my maternal great grandmother. Because of this, we have the same haplotype, and if there are differences in the haplotype sequence (if any) they would be rather small. So I have of way to check my work, which gives me a little more of a safety net.

Today there are a few pictures of people swabbing themselves for DNA and filling out my survey.


* (none of these are actual entries, just made up to provide an example of what is really going on)