Founder Mutation

Founder mutations are a special class of genetic mutations embedded in DNA and are identical in people who have the same mutation. Moreover, the length of the stretch allows us to determine the age of the founder mutation. These founder mutations are not necessarily bad, they can be beneficial as they may be recessive on carriers and thus helping them in different ways, for example, a mutation of sickle cell can allow a carrier to survive malaria better. Also, finding out the origins of the mutations helps us have a better understanding in how our ancestors migrated when they moved out of Africa as we can trace the founder mutation and see a pattern of mutations in different locations. As the PTC mutation confirms the anthropological and archaeological evidence that the original population of modern humans lived in Africa since all non- tasters of the PTC supposed have the same ancestor and it seven of those genes exist in sub- Saharan Africa. It also confirms that every human are indeed members of a single family as we share the inheritance of our genome. Overall, founder mutations is a great way for us to reveal the truth of where we came from and how we arrived at our modern locations.