The population based mitochondrial research programme aims to elucidate the substructure of the African haplogroup L within our Southern African populations, as well as other selected populations from Africa. To this end we have, in various collaborative efforts, investigated and re-defined this ancestral haplogroup.
Unique contributions from this research programme are summarised below:
- Consensus sequence of the Khoi-San population of Southern Africa.
- An ancestral Y haplotype was observed among African populations, and divergence between the ancestral Y haplotypes of the Khoi-San and populations from Northern Cameroon were described.
- Microsatellite loci on the X chromosome displayed a substantially lower level of divergence than those on the Y chromosome.
- Definitive substructure of macrohaplogroup L via high-resolution RFLP analysis and control region sequencing.
Current and previous collaborators were from the following institutions:
International Collaborators
- Centre for Molecular and Mitochondrial Medicine and Genetics, University of California at Irvine, CA, USA.
- Centre for Genome Research, North-West University.
- Emory University and Mercer University School of Medicine, Macon, GA, U.S.A.
- Department of Genetics and Molecular Biology, La Sapienza University, Rome, Italy.