Y Mitochondrial Genotyping

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Another useful tool for genotyping is based on mitochondrial DNA. The mitochondrion is a cytoplasmic organelle that serves as the principal site for the process of oxidative phosphorylation. It is the only organelle in the cell cytoplasm that possesses its own DNA, whose entire sequence is obviously known. Human mitochondrial DNA is maternally inherited without recombination and its mutation rate is about 10 to 100 times higher than the average rate in nuclear DNA.

This last feature improves the likelihood that two unrelated individuals will have different mitochondrial DNA sequences. Mitochondrial DNA sequence analysis is useful to forensic analysis when standard STR-based approaches have been attempted and found to be uninformative. For example highly degraded samples often contain insufficient quantities of nuclear DNA for conventional STR analysis, yet may still contain sufficient quantities of mitochondrial DNA.