Paternity testing involving human remains identification and putative half sister: Usefulness of an X-hexaplex STR markers

Abstract

Paternity testing is being increasingly requested with the aim of challenging presumptive fatherhood. The ability to establish the biological father or mother is usually based on the genotyping of autosomal short tandem repeats (STR). However, in the last few years the use of X chromosomal STR (chr-XSTRs) markers gained strong interest in paternity involving females and specially in kinship analysis where the alleged father is absent since true daughters share the single X-chromosome from their biological father. In this work, we present an approach that combines data from fifteen autosomal and six chr-X STRs in order to know the DNA profiles of presumed relatives by genotyping human remains and/or investigate female as putative half sister or unrelated. As a result, the LR over all available loci for two cases were 1,432,331,424 and 9,357 corresponding to probabilities of 99.9999999% and 99.989%, respectively. The LR values associated to the high probabilities confirm the usefulness of the X-hexaplex STR markers in resolving relationships even thought genotyping human remains.