Autosomal and Y-STR genetic database from a population of the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) and the postwar period

Under the initiative of the "Direcció General de Memòria democràtica-Departament de Justícia" (Generalitat of Catalonia, Spain), a multi-disciplinar project was funded to identify the remains of people disappeared in Catalonia during and after the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939). Samples were officially sent by Autonomous Government of Catalonia to the Laboratory of Forensic and Population Genetics at Complutense University, Madrid, Spain, to be genotyped. Our study presents a database of 343 victims genotyped for STRs comprised in GlobalFiler™ PCR Amplification Kit (Thermofisher Scientific) and a subset of 292 typed with Y-STRs from Yfiler™ Plus PCR Amplification Kit (Thermofisher Scientific). Complete profiles amounted to 116 (33.81%) and 89 (30.48%) for autosomal and Y-STRs respectively. Allelic/haplotype frequencies, forensic parameters and HW equilibrium were calculated with STRAF software. Drop-out frequencies were also calculated for each locus. All the markers were in HW equilibrium (p > 0.05). Allelic drop-out frequencies were larger in the case of CSF1PO (1.5340E-01) and TPOX (1.2640E-01), probably due to extremely low DNA preservation combined with a less efficient PCR for these loci, among other causes. The comparison of our autosomal database with a set of modern European populations from STRidER database (ENFSI) reveals that the present study sample clusters with other West European samples. This is also the case for Y-STR when our study is compared with European and North African samples. Our results seem to suggest that modern Spanish forensic databases can be used to identify deceased persons during the Spanish Civil War and later, from their living descendants.