Genetic analysis of three US population groups using an X-chromosomal STR decaplex

An X-chromosomal multiplex amplifying ten short tandem repeats (STRs) in one single PCR reaction was developed and optimized in this work. The X-STRs included were DXS8378, DXS9898, DXS8377, HPRTB, GATA172D05, DXS7423, DXS6809, DXS7132, DXS101, and DXS6789. Decaplex performance was tested on 377 male samples from three United States population groups, namely, 130 African Americans, 104 Asians, and 143 Hispanics. DXS8377 was the most polymorphic locus across all three populations, whereas DXS7423 was the least informative marker. Genetic distance analysis (R (ST) and F (ST)) performed for the three populations residing in New York showed significant genetic distances between population groups for most pairwise comparisons, except for HPRTB, DXS6809, and DXS7132. When testing linkage disequilibrium for all pairs of loci in the three groups, no significant association was found between any pair of the loci studied, after applying Bonferroni correction. The high values for the average probability of excluding a random man obtained in all three populations when both mother and daughter are tested or when father/daughter relationships are evaluated support the potential of this decaplex system in kinship analysis. Also, the overall high power of discrimination values for samples of female and male origin, confirms the usefulness of this decaplex system in identification analysis. As expected, results also support the use of independent databases comprising these ten X-linked loci for the three US populations evaluated.