Autosomal STR loci for improving the kinship discrimination power for missing children and forensic application

Abstract

Short tandem repeats (STRs) loci are very useful genomic markers with high power of individual discrimination, thus, they have been used for population genetics, forensic application and complex kinship analyses. In this study, we examined allele frequencies and forensic parameters for a total of 23 STR loci, that is, 17 established STRs with 13 CODIS core STR loci and D2S1338, D19S433, Penta E, and Penta D loci, and 6 new STRs (D10S1248, D22S1045, D2S441, D1S1656, D12S391, and SE33) in a sample of 545 unrelated individuals in South Korea. All loci were highly polymorphic and no significant departure from Hardy–Weinberg equilibrium was observed. The addition of 6 new loci to the 17 established STRs increased their power of discrimination by almost eight orders of magnitude (2.52 × 10−20–4.44 × 10−28) and improved the specificity of missing children database searches. Furthermore, we found several microvariant alleles at D2S441 and SE33 loci that have not been reported in the Korean population. We believe that this analysis will be useful for forensic application, deficiency paternity testing and expanding previously established Korean DNA databases.