The development and maintenance of mitochondrial heteroplasmy has important consequences for both health and heredity. Previous studies using pathogenic mutations have shown considerable variability between maternally related individuals and studies of several D-loop polymorphisms have suggested a relationship between heteroplasmy and somatic aging. To broadly explore the variation of human het...

Exceptions to the generally accepted rules that plant mitochondrial genomes are strictly maternally inherited and that within-individual sequence diversity in those genomes, i.e., heteroplasmy, should be minimal are becoming increasingly apparent especially with regard to sequence-level heteroplasmy. These findings raise questions about the potential significance of such heteroplasmy for plant ...

The mitochondrial theory of ageing proposes that damage to mitochondria and diminished mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) repair are major contributors to cellular dysfunction and age-related diseases. We investigate the prevalence of heteroplasmy in the mtDNA control region in buccal swab and blood derived samples for 178 women from the TwinsUK cohort (41 DZ pair 39 MZ pairs, 18 singletons, mean age 57...

PURPOSE To investigate the segregation pattern of the mitochondrial DNA mutation at nucleotide position 3460 responsible for Leber's hereditary optic neuropathy (LHON) and to determine the prevalence of heteroplasmy for the three primary LHON mutations at positions 11778, 3460, and 14484. METHODS Segregation analysis was performed in a cross-sectional study by determining the level of heterop...

A majority of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) mutations reported to be implicated in diseases are heteroplasmic, a status with coexisting mtDNA variants in a single cell. Quantifying the prevalence of mitochondrial heteroplasmy and its pathogenic effect in healthy individuals could further our understanding of its possible roles in various diseases. A total of 1,085 human individuals from 14 global p...

Due to essentially maternal inheritance and a bottleneck effect during early oogenesis, newly arising mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) mutations segregate rapidly in metazoan female germlines. Consequently, heteroplasmy (i.e. the mixture of mtDNA genotypes within an organism) is generally resolved to homoplasmy within a few generations. Here, we report an exceptional transpecific heteroplasmy (predict...

The role that mtDNA heteroplasmy plays in healthy aging, familial longevity and the heritability patterns of low levels heteroplasmy in the elderly are largely unknown. We analyzed the low levels of mtDNA heteroplasmy in blood in a cohort of centenarians, their offspring and a group of offspring of non long‐lived parents, characterized by a less favorable health phenotype. The aims of this stud...

Determining the levels of human mitochondrial heteroplasmy is of utmost importance in several fields. In spite of this, there are currently few published works that have focused on this issue. In order to increase the knowledge of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) heteroplasmy, the main goal of this work is to investigate the frequency and the mutational spectrum of heteroplasmy in the human mtDNA geno...

The co-existence of wild-type and mutated mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) molecules termed heteroplasmy becomes a research hot point of mitochondria. In this review, we listed several methods of mtDNA heteroplasmy research, including the enrichment of mtDNA and the way of calling heteroplasmic variations. At the present, while calling the novel ultra-low level heteroplasmy, high-throughput sequencing...

Mitochondrial heteroplasmy is shown to be extensive when amplification products from the mitochondrial control region are cloned and sequenced from a European bat species. In contrast, a mitochondrial ribosomal RNA gene does not exhibit substantial levels of heteroplasmy when analyzed in an identical way. In the bat, heteroplasmy with respect to length as well as sequence seems to be transmitte...