Tentative evidence for 3?4 haematopoetic stem cells in man

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Abstract
Blood specimens from a random sample of 981 South African Negroid females were typed electrophoretically inter alia for their G-6-PD phenotypes. The allele frequency for GdB and GdnonB was found to be 0.8126 and 0.1874 respectively. Calculating the number of individuals expected for each phenotypic class, a highly significant deviation from the Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium became manifest, i.e. there was a deficit of 24.6% of heterozygotes and an excess of 12.3% of each of the two classes of homozygotes. Several possible reasons for this discrepancy e.g. the effects of pooling sub-samples, selection and misclassifications due to insufficient staining were examined and were found not to be likely explanations for the observed phenomenon. Instead, the result is interpreted as due to only 3–4 stem cells which give rise to the haematopoetic system in man.