Newsletter #11
Hope for Treating LHON and Other Rare Mitochondrial Diseases
Hematological Manifestations of Primary Mitochondrial Disorders
Acta Haematol. (2007) 118/2:88-98
Treating blood production on the cellular level may be the key to preventing the onset of certain rare disorders linked to defective mitochondrial genes. Blood cell therapy with cell substitution, antioxidants and other means may be possible to treat mitochondrial diseases such as Leber’s Hereditary Optic Neuropathy (LHON), Kearns-Sayre Syndrome (anemia) and other disorders.
China Revamps Surname System
August 1, 2007
China has decided to open the door to a million new surname combinations to better distinguish individuals in its society. Previously, it has always been said there were only a hundred surnames to choose from, with Li heading the list. The news was mentioned in the current issue of Nature (vol. 448, no. 7153) with an article titled "The 'hundred surnames' of China run into thousands," by Dafeng Hui (p. 553). Below is a previous news announcement on the move.
New Naming Rules in Mainland China
By Wen Hua
The Epoch Times
Jun 29, 2007
China is proposing a new naming regulation that would require newborn children to adopt either or both parents' surnames as their surname. The plans are currently being discussed at a grassroots level. To date, there has been no official regulation on naming.
According to the Yangzi Evening News, there are 1601 surnames in China. If the policy goes into effect, approximately 1,280,000 new surnames will be created. This will reduce the amount of duplicate names and help to more clearly identify children's blood relationships.
The regulation states that new names must contain between two to six characters and must not damage the country's dignity, infringe on local folk customs, or have a negative impact on society. The names must use the simplified version of Chinese characters if they exist, and must not use eliminated variant characters, self-created characters, foreign names, or pinyin or Arabic numerals.
To prevent frequent name changes, the regulation would permit citizens 18 years and over to change their name (both surname and given name) only once. Those that change their names with fake certifications would be fined 800 yuan (approximately US$105).
Research shows that the Chinese naming convention stems from a matriarchal society where people formed clans around mothers. To differentiate clans, they used the mother's surname as the clan title. These surnames commonly contained the character component (radical) that stood for 'woman'.
In addition to this, the following factors are believed to have influenced the creation and use of Chinese surnames:
1. A forefather's home state or kingdom, such as the states of Zhao, Song, Qin, and Wu. 2. A forefather's title, such as the ancient official titles 'Sima' and 'Situ'. 3. A forefather's rank of nobility, such as 'Wang' and 'Hou'. 4. A forefather's given name. 5. An occupation, such as a pottery maker using the word for 'pottery' as a surname. 6. A place name or physical description of the location's scenery such as Dongguo, Ximen, Chi, and Liu. 7. Worship of animals like horses, cows, sheep, and dragons. Elements from these characters were mixed into surnames.
The book "One Hundred Surnames", written during the Song Dynasty, includes about 500 surnames, of which 60 are compound surnames. According to statistics, there were about 5000 surnames in ancient documents. Now there are about 200 common surnames.
Ancient people's names were more complex than modern people's. Besides surnames and given names, additional words were used to identify one's position in the family hierarchy. People sharing the same hierarchy were required to have one identical word in their names.
People who were cultured or had social status had additional names such as 'Zi' (a courtesy name traditionally given to Chinese males at the age of 20, marking their coming of age), and 'Hao' (a self-selected courtesy name, usually referred to as the pseudonym).
For example, the Song Dynasty author Su Shi's surname was 'Su' and his given name was 'Shi'. In addition to this he had 'Zizhan' as his 'Zi' name, and 'Dongpo Jushi' as his 'Hao' name. The Tang Dynasty poet Li Bai lived in Shichuan's Qinglian County. He thus often used an additional name 'Qinglian Jushi' (as his Hao name) to signify: "Person who lives in Qinglian."
Traditionally many people also believed that names foretold one's future. Extensive research went into choosing a name based on date of birth and the corresponding eight characters of the Chinese horoscope.
Parentage and sibship exclusions: higher statistical power with more family members
By J. Wang
Heredity (May 2007) 99, 205–217
Abstract
Parentage exclusion probabilities are now routinely calculated in genetic marker-assisted parentage analyses to indicate the statistical power of the analyses achievable for a given set of markers, and to measure the informativeness of a set of markers for parentage inference. Previous formulas invariably assume that parentage is to be sought for a single offspring, while in practice multiple full siblings might be sampled (for example, seeds, eggs or young from a pair of monogamous parents) and their father, mother or both are to be assigned among a number of candidates. In this study, I derive formulas for parentage exclusion probabilities for an arbitrary number (n) of fullsibs, which reduce to previous equations for the special case of n=1. I also derive sibship exclusion probabilities, and investigate the power of differentiating half-sib, avuncular and grandparent–grandoffspring relationships using unlinked autosomal markers among different numbers of tested individuals. Applications of the formulas are demonstrated using both theoretical and empirical data sets of allele frequencies. The results from the study highlight the conclusion that the power of genealogical relationship inferences can be enhanced enormously by analysing multiple individuals for a given set of markers. The equations derived in this study allow more accurate determination of marker information and of the power of a parentage/sibship analysis. In addition, they can be used to guide experimental designs of parentage analyses in selecting markers and determining the number of offspring to be sampled and genotyped.
Britain out of Europe...
Nature 448:7751, July 19, 2007
Editor's Summary:
Britain became geographically isolated from continental Europe when high interglacial seas flooded the shallow English Channel and North Sea shelf areas. But a tenuous link remained: the Weald–Artois chalk ridge between southeast England and northwest France. Just how this isthmus was breached, making Britain an island, has been a matter of conjecture. A new bathymetric map of the sea floor may solve the mystery. It reveals a large bedrock-floored valley containing landforms, including grooves and streamlined islands, consistent with a megaflood event caused when a rock dam at the Dover Strait breached, draining a large pro-glacial lake in the North Sea basin.
News and Views: Palaeogeography: Europe cut adrift
By Philip Gibbard
The floor of the English Channel provides evidence for two catastrophic floods arising from the drainage of huge glacial lakes in the area of the southern North Sea. These megafloods made Britain what it is today.
Letter: Catastrophic flooding origin of shelf valley systems in the English Channel
By Sanjeev Gupta et al.
Y chromosome travelled north
By N Bradman and M G Thomas
Heredity (2007) 99, pp 3–4
Reflecting further on the surprising find of an African male lineage in Yorkshire, these two geneticists remark:
It is a genetic cliché that there is more diversity within the principal groupings of mankind than between them. But that is not the whole story. During the evolution of Anatomically Modern Man, groups of humans were sufficiently isolated from each other that through genetic drift, selection or a combination of both, important inter-group differences arose. Genetic diseases common in one or more groups and absent in others and variation in many enzymes that metabolize drugs and foods are examples. During the past few thousand years, these previously separated groups have, with expansion and migration over increasing distances, encountered each other, sharing the diversity born in isolation. As that process advances, the genomic archive of populations will become increasingly like an indecipherable palimpsest. The challenge is to extract as much information as we can before the record disappears.
The authors maintain that the challenge of unpuzzling such anomalies will only be overcome through a multi-disciplinary approach in which genetics is but one testimony among many others:
Greater insights into the recent demographic histories of peoples are likely to increasingly involve the analysis of genetic data within the context of evaluating hypotheses derived from multiple non-genetic sources: linguistics, history, social anthropology and archaeology. The genomic archive is not necessarily a decisive or even better source of information, but it is an additional tool that can be used to unravel the multiple treads of our common past.
Who's Your Granddaddy?"
Paternal Grandfather Confirmed as Main Influence on Family Nutrition and Longevity
European Journal of Human Genetics 15:784-90.
25 April 2007
Transgenerational response to nutrition, early life circumstances and longevity
Gunnar Kaati et al.
A study of 271 individuals with 1626 grandparents finds that there is a sex-specific influence from grandparents on pre-pubescents' nutrition, which in turn determines longevity. The influence for boys comes from their paternal grandfather and for girls from their paternal grandmother during the formative years between 8 and 12 years old, so the father's parents set the tone for childhood social circumstances that lead to poor, average or good nutrition.
The study confirms earlier findings, which ultimately mean that your father's ancestral Y chromosome line (and the female marriage partners attracted to it) is a major influence on your health and longevity. So who were your paternal grandparents?
Old Theories about Polynesians
Come Home to Roost with DNA
Biological anthropologist Elizabeth Matisoo-Smith of the University of Auckland in New Zealand has come up with proof, in the form of chicken bones, that show Polynesians were in America long before Christopher Columbus showed up.
Her dating of chicken bones found in Chile, shows before the Spanish arrived, Polynesians had gone there, had given the American Indians chickens and probably got sweet potato in exchange.
An article about the discovery appears in Nature 447/7145:620, "DNA reveals how the chicken crossed the sea," by Brendan Borrell.
The origins and travels of the Polynesians were the lifelong study of Harvard biologist Barry Fell, a native New Zealander who was widely shunned by other academicians for his theories of diffusion across the Pacific. As early as the 1970s, geographer George F. Carter offered evidence the Polynesians brought chickens to South America and took away sweet potatoes, among many other exchanges of culture.
In 1992, Oxford geneticist Bryan Sykes disproved the theory put forth by Thor Heyderdaal with the balsam boat called Kon-Tiki that American Indians sailed across the Pacific from East to West to found Polynesia. The chicken bones support what diffusionists have maintained for decades, that cultural influences ran in the opposite direction.