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In a recent disputed paternity case involving a family of six siblings with deceased parents and a woman claiming to be half sib of them, the question asked by the judge concerned the significance of knowing the genotypes of the legitimate children for determining the probability of paternity. We addressed this problem both by an analytical method and by computer simulations. The chance of excluding a false relationship by at least three incompatibilities, if the relationship was false, was rather poor (0.123), whereas the chance of obtaining a high probability of paternity if the relationship was true was higher than 99.9% almost with certainty.

This study reports the selection of 22 autosomal SNPs and the setting of PCR and minisequencing multiplexes suitable for forensic purposes.

We report on 34 subjects from a small Italian town distributed among 13 different surnames. Their genealogies have been reconstructed to the most recent common ancestor, going back in a case to the 15th century, and their haplotypes at 12 Y-chromosome STR has been determined. Six surnames (14 subjects) did not show variation at any locus among isonymous individuals, whereas seven surnames (20 subjects) showed single-step differences at single loci (two in DYS391 and DYS390, the others in DYS385, DYS392 and DYS393); in addition, two subjects of two different surnames showed 8 and 9 locus differences, respectively.

The aim of this study was to set up a multiplex PCR of eight autosomal single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) suitable for forensic purposes.

This work presents preliminary results concerning a collaborative exercise on mitochondrial DNA by laboratories of the (GeFI group).

The hypervariable regions HVI and HVII of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) were sequenced in 50 unrelated individuals living in Veneto. A total of 48 different mtDNA haplotypes for HVI region (404 bp) and 49 for HVII region (313 bp) were observed. Nucleotide diversity was 0.0116 and 0.0097, respectively.

Haplotype data of 1176 Italian males from 10 regions were obtained as a part of a collaborative validation exercise. Individual data are available at http://www.gefi-forensicDNA.it .

Six previously characterized STR loci with amplification products smaller than 125 bp have been typed in a sample of 100 unrelated subjects born in Tuscany, Italy, using a protocol involving two triplexes. These loci, called bminiSTRQ, represent promising tools for recovering genetic information from degraded DNA samples when standard loci generate partial profiles. D 2005 Published by Elsevier B.V.