ThinkGene's Josh writes about a paper recently published in The American Journal of Human Genetics that looked at the number of potentially harmful mitochondrial DNA mutations in the general population. Researchers at the University of Newcastle and the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute used a combination of high-throughput genotyping and sequencing to find that a large number of people have mitochondrial DNA mutations that may lead to disease. Author David Samuels says, "This study gives us, for the first time, a measurement of the number of these carriers of pathogenic mitochondrial DNA mutations in the general population. One in every 200 individuals is a lot of people -- around 1.5 million people in the United States alone."