A decade ago Emmeline Hill, Dr Patrick Cunningham and others from the Trinity College in Dublin published a seminal paper on thoroughbred mitochondrial DNA. The paper, which caused some controversy at the time showed that the maternally inherited mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) did not correspond with pedigree records, that is, as good a job that Bruce Lowe, Bobinski and Shirai had done, the pedigree records were inaccurate at some point in time. Hill found that almost half of the