Genetic polymorphism of 29 highly informative InDel markers for forensic use in the Chinese Han population

The interest of forensic researchers in single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) has been attracted because of its potential advantages, such as low mutation rates, amenable to high-throughput automated platform and the improved application in the analysis of degraded samples. In this article, 29 highly informative insertion/deletion (InDel) polymorphism markers were selected from the dbSNP (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/SNP/), according to the given criteria. Allele frequencies for the 29 InDels were determined in a sample of 109 unrelated individuals living in Shanghai in East China with an SNPlex genotyping system. The values of observed heterozygosity (Ho), power of discrimination (PD), power of exclusion (PE) and polymorphism information content (PIC) were calculated. The combined power of discrimination was 0.999999999990867 and the cumulative probability of exclusion (CPE) was 0.9930. All of the 29 InDel markers were in accordance with the Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium (P>0.0017, after Bonferroni correction for multiple testing). The obtained frequency distributions were compared with other previously reported population data.