Suitability and Efficiency of PCR Systems in Forensics

Since the discovery of a high number of VNTR systems (Nakamura et al. 1987) in the non-coding region of DNA and HLA class II sequence polymorphism (Saiki et al. 1986), in the last few years many laboratories have concentrated on the study of these polymorphic systems by means of the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) technique (Saiki et al. 1985).The aims were first to increase the number of polymorphisms investigated and second to demonstrate their power in forensic identification and paternity testing. To the latter end, collaborative research on PCR systems was performed in the laboratories of Ancona and Parma, studying the genetic frequency distribution of several polymorphisms on a sufficient number of Italian subjects. The systems involved in this study were DQα (Saiki et al. 1986), ApoB (Boerwinkle et al. 1989, Ludwig et al. 1989), MCT118 (Kasai et al. 1990), YNZ22 (Horn et al. 1989), COL2A1 (Wu et al. 1990), HUMTH01 (Edwards et al. 1992) and HUMvWA31 (Kimpton et al. 1992). The present work shows the allele frequency distribution of these PCR systems and their efficiency in forensic casework.