Ethnic differentiation at VNTR loci, with special reference to forensic applications
- Yale Univ., New Haven, CT (United States)
Allele-rich VNTR loci provide valuable information for forensic inference. Interpretation of this information is complicated by measurement error, which renders discrete alleles difficult to distinguish. Two methods have been used to circumvent this difficulty-i.e, binning methods and direct evaluation of allele frequencies, the latter achieved by modeling the data as a mixture distribution. The authors use this modeling approach to estimate the allele frequency distributions for two loci-D17S79 and D2S44-for black, Caucasian, and Hispanic samples from the Lifecodes and FBI data bases. The databases are differentiated by the restriction enzyme used: PstI (Lifecodes) and HaeIII (FBI). The results show that alleles common in one ethnic group are almost always common in all ethnic groups, and likewise for rare alleles; this pattern holds for both loci. Gene diversity, or heterozygosity, measured as one minus the sum of the squared allele frequencies, is greater for D2S44 than for D17S79, in both data bases. The average gene diversity across ethnic groups when PstI (HaeIII) is used is .918 (.918) for D17S79 and is .985 (.983) for D2S44. The variance in gene diversity among ethnic groups is greater for D17S79 than for D2S44. The number of alleles, like the gene diversity, is greater for D2S44 than for D17S79. The mean numbers of alleles across ethnic groups, estimated from the PstI (HaeIII) data, are 40.25 (41.5) for D 17S79 and 104 (103) for D2S44. The number of alleles is correlated with sample size. The authors use the estimated allele frequency distributions for each ethnic group to explore the effects of unwittingly mixing populations and thereby violating independence assumptions. They show that, even in extreme cases of mixture, the estimated genotype probabilities are good estimates of the true probabilities, contradicting recent claims. 35 refs., 9 figs., 3 tabs.
- OSTI ID:
- 5017824
- Journal Information:
- American Journal of Human Genetics; (United States), Vol. 51:3; ISSN 0002-9297
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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