Answer to Question #23580 in Molecular Biology for Leila

Question

I need to know how many people in a population of, say a million will share the same Y-chromosome. In other words, if a man has a given Y-chromosome, how many other people in the city or country will have the identical one to his, statistically?

Answer 1

Inhumans, the Y-Chromosome spans 58 million base pairs — the building blocks of DNA — and represents approximately 0.38% of the total DNA in a human cell.The human Y-Chromosome contains 78 genes, which code for only 23 distinct proteins. Because the Y-chromosome changes relatively slowly over time and is only passed along the direct male line, it may be used to trace paternal lineage.