Who's Your Momma?...Mitochondria

Background:
     Since the first signs of life, single-cell organisms have contained DNA that gave the origin of their existence. Mitochondria is an example of one of those organisms. It is believed that the mitochondria used to be free-living cells that were captured by eukaryotic cells. This created a symbiotic relationship for the eukaryotes and mitochondria, one gaining nutrients and the other gaining a mechanism to use oxygen for energy. Mitochondria have a unique set of DNA (37 genes) that result from single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNP), which can be used to trace ancestry. In fact, they did. At UC Berkeley, they discovered by tracing generations to a common ancestor, modern humans came from Africa, 200,000 years ago. They realized that the mtDNA is only transferred by the mother to the egg cell. This mtDNA is very important to analyze because it can identify unknown human remains, trace generations, and relate different species to one another. Some disorders may  occur when some mitochondria in an organism's cells do not match up with other cells in the body, called heteroplasmy. These disorders occur in adulthood, as opposed to homoplasmy, which stops embryonic development in the first place.

Purpose:
The purpose of this lab is to understand and better understand mitochondrial DNA and its purpose.

Procedure:
For this lab, we extract our DNA the same way we did for the Disease Gene lab, involving saline solution, instagene matrix, and PCR. The new material to this lab is the mitochondrial DNA. We will use primers to bracket the mt  control region, which will only copy the the specific section of DNA. Afterwards, we will do the same gel electrophoresis that was done in the previous lab to tell us how similar our mitochondrial DNA is.

Results:
Based on our gel results, we saw that the mitochondrial DNA had almost identical bandwidth. This is not a surprise because 99.9% of human DNA is identical. We will send the rest of our DNA samples to the lab for sequencing so that we can compare our DNA even further.

Discussion:
Mitochondrial DNA is important for tracing our origins and studying evolutionary patterns. Doing this lab allows us to understand our development and have us realize how we are connected to others. Because DNA is universal, it is easy to map out our DNA history and at the same time, see ways that we could possibly develop. Minute details in our DNA have been found to cause significant problems, but if we could learn the different aspects as a whole and eventually head off future problems.