Fig. 2

Inference of processes affecting heteroplasmy statistics through life and generations. a The set of processes that potentially influence heteroplasmy, inducing both one-off and time-dependent changes in mean and variance. b Illustration of the influence of these processes on observed mtDNA statistics (transformed change from reference tissue) over time. Solid lines give mean heteroplasmy; shaded regions denote variance, both of which may vary over time according to the corresponding parameter. c Relating the observations from our dataset construction protocol (Fig. 1) to the values of these mechanistic parameters, allowing us to use parameteric inference to identify and learn the contribution of each mechanism to observe heteroplasmy patterns. Supplementary Figure 1 illustrates the expected behaviour of mtDNA observations for further different values and combinations of these mechanistic parameters