Assessment of the effectiveness of the EUROFORGEN NAME and Precision ID Ancestry panel markers for ancestry investigations

D Truelsen,N Morling,C Børsting,T Tvedebrink,M A Shan,V Pereira,M S Farzad,H S Mogensen

doi:10.1038/s41598-021-97654-0

D Truelsen, N Morling + Show 6 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-97654-0

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Journal: Scientific Reports	Publication Date: Sep 20, 2021
Citations: 7	License type: open-access

Affiliation: University of Copenhagen, Aalborg University

Abstract

The EUROFORGEN NAME panel is a regional ancestry panel designed to differentiate individuals from the Middle East, North Africa, and Europe. The first version of the panel was developed for the MassARRAY system and included 111 SNPs. Here, a custom AmpliSeq EUROFORGEN NAME panel with 102 of the original 111 loci was used to sequence 1098 individuals from 14 populations from Europe, the Middle East, North Africa, North-East Africa, and South-Central Asia. These samples were also sequenced with a global ancestry panel, the Precision ID Ancestry Panel. The GenoGeographer software was used to assign the AIM profiles to reference populations and calculate the weight of the evidence as likelihood ratios. The combination of the EUROFORGEN NAME and Precision ID Ancestry panels led to fewer ambiguous assignments, especially for individuals from the Middle East and South-Central Asia. The likelihood ratios showed that North African individuals could be separated from European and Middle Eastern individuals using the Precision ID Ancestry Panel. The separation improved with the addition of the EUROFORGEN NAME panel. The analyses also showed that the separation of Middle Eastern populations from European and South-Central Asian populations was challenging even when both panels were applied.

Highlights

The identification of perpetrators of crimes by DNA investigations may be hindered by the absence of a reference sample from the offenders or database hits
The current political borders between the countries in the Middle East were agreed between the United Kingdom and France in 1 91611,16, and they do not reflect the genetics of the Middle East populations[12,13,17,18]
The panels work well as global ancestry panels; the purpose of which is to explore whether a DNA sample from an unidentified individual could originate from any of the major geographical regions of e.g. Sub-Saharan Africa, Europe, East Asia, and the Americas[6,7,25,26,27,28,29,30]

Summary

Introduction

The identification of perpetrators of crimes by DNA investigations may be hindered by the absence of a reference sample from the offenders or database hits. The resolution of ancestry at the continental level, e.g. Africa, Europe, East Asia, and the Americas has been achieved using commercially available panels including the Precision ID Ancestry Panel and the ForenSeq DNA Signature Prep Kit[4,5,6,7,8,9]. We typed 1098 individuals from 14 populations from the Middle East, North Africa, North-East Africa, South-Central Asia, and Europe for 265 AIMs using the AmpliSeq EUROFORGEN NAME panel and the Precision ID Ancestry Panel (Thermo Fisher Scientific)[6]. It was further investigated if the combination of the panels increased the weight of the evidence of the assignment of the population of origin

Methods

Results

Conclusion