Figure 1.
Schematic illustration of two developmental genetic bottlenecks proposed to impact on mitochondrial inheritance.
A bottleneck in the female germ line has been proposed to be caused without the physical reduction of mtDNA content per cell but rather by relaxed amplification of a subset of the mtDNA population per cell (NeOog) [21]. The bottleneck during embryogenesis has been suggested to occur via random partitioning of mitochondria in the cleaving embryo resulting in a physical bottleneck at the early blastocyst stage (NeEmb) [20].
Table 1.
Summary of heteroplasmy levels for each family [% mutant allele].
Table 2.
Variation in heteroplasmy levels between measurements at each developmental stage of randomly chosen oocyte and offspring samples and of all females to determine the measurement error.
Table 3.
Triplicate measurements of heteroplasmy levels G4149A in various tissues of mothers 214 and 263 [% mutant allele].
Figure 2.
Posterior distributions on Ne, the effective bottleneck number of mitochondrial genomes per cell.
Figure 3.
Posterior distribution on heteroplasmy measurement error.