A comparison of adjustment methods to test the robustness of an STR DNA database comprised of 24 European populations

Does an English appeal court ruling increase the risks of miscarriages of justice when complex DNA profiles are searched against the national DNA database?

“…Previous work on the application of statistics to database searches has focussed on full (unambiguous) single contributor DNA profiles [28] and for this category of sample, false positives are very rare since the probability of a chance match with the average genotype (SGM plus) is approximately 10 À13 [12]. The same rationale cannot be extended to partial, low-template multicontributor mixtures discussed here.…”

“…Simulations of a national DNA database were carried out using allele frequencies based on a UK Caucasian population [12]. We did not specifically simulate any sub-structuring (different racial groups or relatedness) except that calculations were adjusted using Fst = 0.02 [30] (this will not affect any conclusions made in this paper).…”

Validation of a 21-locus autosomal SNP multiplex for forensic identification purposes

“…2a-c). All data fitted within the random number bins for each race group indicating that the SNP loci were behaving as expected within a randomlymating population with little or no linkage disequilibrium [21,22]. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the test an artificial sub-structured population was created using data from the White Caucasian and Indian sub-continent populations.…”

Allele frequencies for 70 autosomal SNP loci with U.S. Caucasian, African-American, and Hispanic samples

“…A total of 10 of the 210 tests (70 loci  3 populations) for Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium indicated a deviation from the expected result. As has been noted before, it is reasonable to expect approximately 5%, or 10 to 11 out of 210, of the comparisons to deviate from Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium (see [6,7]). Those P-values significant at the 95% confidence level are those less than 0.05 and bolded in Tables 2-4.…”