Assessing false paternity risk in simulated motherless cases from more than 20 000 real exclusion trios.

Abstract

When the mother's DNA profile is not available for paternity testing, there is a smaller probability that a locus will exclude an alleged father. This study aims to evaluate the risk of potential false paternity inclusions in motherless cases. More than 20 000 duos were generated by removing the maternal genotypes from exclusion trios. After recalculating paternity in these duos, any found inclusions would be false. The use of an appropriate number of loci, mutation model, and mutation rates to analyze motherless paternity cases was robust against false inclusions. A single potential false inclusion was observed in a case wherein kinship plays a role. This result highlights the importance of testing the mother when available and of obtaining information on family circumstances for the proper handling of cases involving related individuals. The guidelines we used here were sufficient to avoid false inclusions in a data set of more than 20 000 motherless cases.