Questioning Evidence for Recombination in Human Mitochondrial DNA

The possibility of recombination in human mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA), raised recently by Awadalla et al. (1), holds crucial implications for many evolutionary studies (2). Here, we reexamine the data analyzed in (1), show that some of those data are likely unreliable, and suggest that the short-distance correlations found by Awadalla et al. (1) can be more plausibly interpreted phylogenetically.