Nature 352, 255 - 257 (18 July 1991); doi:10.1038/352255a0

Paternal inheritance of mitochondrial DNA in mice

Ulf Gyllensten^*, Dan Wharton^†, Agneta Josefsson^* & Allan C. Wilson^‡

^*Department of Medical Genetics, Biomedical Center, University of Uppsala, Box 589, S-751 23 Uppsala, Sweden
^†New York Zoological Society, Bronx Zoo, New York 10460, and Department of Biological Sciences, Fordham University, Bronx, New York 10458, USA
^‡Division of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, University of California, Berkeley, California 94720, USA

FOR nearly 20 years it has been assumed on the basis of low-resolution experiments that mitochondrial (mt)DNA, in contrast to the genes in the nucleus, has an exclusively maternal mode of inheritance in animals¹. Using the polymerase chain reaction^{2, 3}, paternally inherited mtDNA molecules have now been detected in mice at a frequency of 10^-4, relative to the maternal contributions. These mice were hybrids between two inbred strains (C57BL/6J and Mus spretus) whose mtDNAs can be distinguished easily. This new mode of inheritance provides a mechanism for generating heteroplasmy and may explain mitochondrial disorders exhibiting biparental transmission.

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