Palindromic Testing for ht35 Haplotypes

I've written before about my suspicions that a significant portion of the R1b1c in Italy may be an "eastern" variant of R1b1c called ht35. 

In short summary, the notion is that R1b1c originally arose in eastern Europe (perhaps Anatolia) and subsequently spread west into western Europe.  The western spread of R1b1c is predominately marked by a TaqI 49a,f RFLP haplotype known as ht15 whereas in eastern Europe both ht15 and ht35 are found.  We have very limited data about ht35, though Cinnioglu et al. contains some STR haplotype from which we can infer that R1b1c with DYS393=12 and DYS461=11 are more likely to be ht35 than ht15.  About 30% of the R1b1c in the Italy DNA Project fits this profile.

One problem is that the TaqI 49a,f test is not commercially available.  It would be nice to find a proxy, therefore, and so I am proposing a hopeful experiment.  Because the TaqI test fragments are in the Yq11 region, there is a chance that extended testing of STRs in this region (i.e. the FTDNA Panel 5 Palindromic Pack) might reveal interesting and useful haplotype data.

To that end, I propose to test several DYS393=12 and DYS461=11 members of the Italy DNA Project for the Palindromic panel of markers.  To the best of my knowledge, no one with that haploype has yet undertaken the full Panel 5 test.

I have set up a ChipIn to help fund this testing.  People who are interested in furthering this particular goal can "chip in" some money to fund the testing.  I have set the goal so that I can fully test at least two people for the entire panel.  If the goal is not met, I'll use all the funds on the palindromic markers most likely (in my judgement) to provide a useful result.  If more money than the goal is raised, I'll test additional haplotypes.