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August 15, 2009: One month Progress Report.
October 8, 2009: FTDNA is making two major changes relating to mtDNA. First, for current customers the upgrade prices to full-sequence (FGS or Mega) tests are being drastically reduced. From the regular $400+ the new discount price for those with HVR2 results is $179. For those with only HVR1 results it is $199. Orders at these discount prices have to be placed and paid for by October 31, 2009. They will be sending an official announcement to everyone concerned in a few days, but the prices are already available on your Order Tests and Certificates tab under Standard Orders on your personal page. New technology is allowing FTDNA to process these tests in less time. (If you have friends or relatives who have yet to test their mtDNA, you might tell them to wait until November for a new price on the mtFullSequence test.) Second, FTDNA will be making changes next week relating to the display of mtDNA results on your personal page. If you have a heteroplasmy, that will be noted. (Yes, they will provide a link to a FAQ on heteroplasmies.) They will standardize some mutation nomenclature, most of which does not apply to U8. Also, some subclade designations will be changed for those with FGS results. For example, right now some with FGS and similar results are shown as U8, U8a or U8a1. The CRS charts on your Results page will be changed to more clearly show your differences. Mitosearch will be updated to reflect the above changes and more haplogroup categories will be available. Please hold your questions on these changes until they are implemented.
November 2, 2009: 27 members. The FGS sale is over, with four tests ordered by Project members. That's a pretty high percentage, especially considering that half our members already have FGS results. New regular FGS or Mega prices just listed are: HVR2toMega: $209 HVR1toMega: $229 mtFullSequence for existing customers: $249 mtFullSequence for new customers: $279 (just announced) The upgrade prices are still substantially lower than the previous regular prices.
February 22, 2010: A new study by Soares, et al., entitled The Archaeogenetics of Europe has just been published and is available for free reading or download. Of special interest to us are some assertions about haplogroups U8 and K. I quote: “The most ancient mtDNA lineages in Europe belong to haplogroup U5 and U8, which appear to have originated within Europe from the root of haplogroup U (Figure 1). U8 appears to have an age of c. 50,000 years in Europe, although its subclade K appears in the Near East around 30 kya (Table 1).” The only subclade of K mentioned is K2a, which the article describes as a Neolithic immigrant to Europe, with an age of 6 to 9 kya. See Table 1 for haplogroup ages calculated several different ways. Rough estimates of a few subclade ages may be seen by downloading the PDF and zooming Figure 1, or by looking at the high quality version of the figure on the web. The article says that U8 originated in Europe, while K originated in the Near East (called Southwest Asia in Figure 1). If you look at the Google maps on our K and U8 project websites, you will see these origins reflected in the maternal origins of our project members. Figure 1 shows U8a with a European origin, while U8b – K’s nearer relative – with an origin in “Europe and Asia.” The two known U8b examples from scientific papers trace back to Italy and Jordan (the only known U8 with a Near East connection). However, the FTDNA U8b sequences, which appear to be even closer to K, have origins in Sweden and Norway.
June 2, 2011: 48 members. Article discussing possible Caucasus origin of haplogroup K and the connection to U8b.
December 30, 2011: 50 members. New PhyloTree Build 13 has three new U8 subclades. For my discussion see here.
April 5, 2012: 57 members. See new Behar et al. paper <a href="http://www.cell.com/AJHG/retrieve/pii/S0002929712001462">A "Copernican" Reassessment of the Human Mitochondrial DNA Tree from its Root</a>. See also new <a href="http://www.phylotree.org/">PhyloTree Build 14</a>, which, based on the paper, adds six new U8 subclades and revises three.Your Project administrator is listed in the Acknowledgements in both documents. As discussed in the paper, credit also goes to all of you who sent your full-sequence results to GenBank and/or provided your consents for FTDNA to submit them. Not sure yet how many of the 4,265 new sequences are from U8. Much more on this in the future.
May 7, 2012: 58 members.
As previously announced, there is a new scientific paper by Behar et al. (2012b) that transmitted 4,265 mtDNA full sequences to the GenBank database, with 4,222 of those sequences comingfrom FTDNA customers who had previously consented to their use for science. Of those sequences, 20 were from haplogroup U8, mostly from members of our U8Project. All of the sequences were simultaneously used to create new and revised subclades on Build 14 of the PhyloTree. Eventually, FTDNA will change members’ subclade designations where appropriate.
I have now created new Subgroupson the U8 Project website mtDNA Results tab; the total number of Subgroups now being 12. Also, each Subgroup may be selected and viewed on the Google mapstab. The greatly increased number of Subgroups allows for much better resolution of the possible maternal origins of our subclades. If you have not already done so, you should add your deepest maternal location to the map. Goto your FTDNA personal page, My Account, Personal Profile, Genealogy, MostDistant Ancestors, then under Direct Maternal click on Add Location. Please do this even if you only know the name of your country of origin.
A detailed explanation of the new and revised Subgroups and subclades may be found HERE.
Not all consented sequences were sent to GenBank. Identical sequences were not sent; neither were sequences which duplicated ones already on GenBank from FTDNA. Also, the cutoff date fort ransmitted sequences was about a year ago, so if you consented or received results since then, your results were not sent. I will address the question of whose sequences from the U8 Project were sent in a future e-mail.
FTDNA has changed the method by which individuals may directly submit their own full sequences to GenBank.However, although the old method may not be used, the new method, under “Upload My Results” on the FTDNA mtDNAcommunity.org website, is still under construction. I will also discuss this in the future when details are available.
June 24, 2012: 59 members. There is an abstract of a major new scientific paper on the origins of haplogroups U8 and K, which will have a new phylogenetic tree of the haplogroups: Abstract More information will be provided when the paper and tree are available.December 12, 2012: 63 members. December 12, 2012: 2,652 members. FTDNA made several major updates and revisions to its websites today. For us, the major change was the upgrading of our subclade designations to the PhyloTree Build 14 level; that's as of last April. Our Subgroups are already at the Build 15 level, so they are a little behind. I have submitted a couple of proposed corrections to the HelpDesk. I also moved a couple of people to the correct Subgroup if I had them misplaced, sometimes because the member had not made his or her coding-region mutations list available to me. I was not able to Subgroup what I couldn't see.
If you look at your personal page - which has numerous changes - you will see under your mtDNA Results tab that they now default to RSRS format rather than the rCRS format, which is still used on the Project mutations list. I have suggested this be changed back.
Your mtDNA Matches list now show FMS matches with up to four differences, instead of requiring exact matches. Some of these new "matches" are in different subclades and may be too far back in time to find a genealogical connection.
Note that the odd U8b'K designation is gone for a few of you; you are now just in U8b1b1.
March 22, 2013: 66 members. A new paper has just been published thatincludes a newly-available U8 sequence that is about 31,000 years old. Thepaper, Revised Timescale of Human mtDNA Evolution (Fu et al. 2013), is behind apay wall; but the Dienekes' Anthropology Blog has a good summary.More information may be found here.The skeleton was one of three found near the village of Dolni Vestonice inMoravia, Czech Republic. The sequence has mutation 9698C (using the rCRSstandard) that defines our haplogroup U8. It also has one of the definingmutations for U8b, 3480G; but it does not have the other two definers, 9055Aand 14167T. It also has 16183c and 16189C, which are found in most U8b1sequences; but it doesn’t have 195C, 16234T or the back mutation at position1811 that also define U8b1. So the sequence appears to have been a U8 that wason the branch that would eventually become U8b, but had not yet acquired thatsubclade’s full complement of defining mutations.
October 8, 2013: 81 members. A major U8-K paper has just been published: <a href="http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2013/131008/ncomms3543/full/ncomms3543.html">A substantial prehistoric European ancestry amongst Ashkenazi maternal lineages.</a> The paper includes a new U8-K phylogenetic tree. More later on this.