Preliminary exploration of a novel method for the deconvolution of DNA mixtures by pyrosequencing

Abstract The deconvolution of DNA mixtures has been a thorny issue. Several kinds of genetic markers, such as STR, SNP, SNP/DIP-STR and microhaplotypes etc., as well as capillary electrophoresis, NGS and other technical platforms are used to solve this problem. In this study, we propose a novel method for the analysis of DNA mixtures. This method employed multiplex pyrosequencing to sequence several selected microhaplotypes. Employing a sparse representation-based AdvISER-MH-PYRO algorithm, the original pyrosequencing (PSQ) signals of the DNA mixtures were deciphered to determine the contributors of the mixtures. Our preliminary data show that this method can resolve the number of contributors to a DNA mixture composed of 2-4 individuals.