Journal of Genetic Genealogy 3(2)i-iii, 2007 Editor’s Corner Mutation Rates – Who’s Got the Right Values?

A discussion on Y-STR mutation rates seems to come up on the various e-mail lists about once each month. The discussion has also been carried on from time to time in the professional journals as well. Most of the interest has been in the rates derived from father-son pairs, as that seems most applicable to Y-chromosome surname projects. Shortly after Family Tree DNA (FTDNA) expanded its offerings to 37 markers about three years ago, the company asked selected surname project administrators to submit mutation data and genealogies from their projects where the genealogy was fairly well established. They have never published their results, so we don’t know how large of a dataset they used, but they have announced the average values that they obtained. Since FTDNA used three panels of markers at that time, there were five possible average values of interest—the average fo