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Nature 413, 37-38 (6 September 2001) | doi:10.1038/35092623

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Evolutionary genetics: Clonal inheritance of avian mitochondrial DNA

Sofia Berlin1 & Hans Ellegren1

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We have taken a new approach to test the commonly accepted, but recently questioned, principle1, 2 of clonal inheritance of vertebrate mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) by relating its inheritance to a female-specific marker of nuclear DNA. Whereas this is impossible in organisms with male heterogamy (such as mammals), we show here that genealogies of mtDNA and the female-specific W chromosome of a bird species are completely concordant. Our results indicate that inheritance of mtDNA is free of detectable recombination effects over an evolutionary timescale.