New sensitive amplification primers for the STR locus D2S1338 for degraded casework DNA.

PCR primers for the locus D2S1338 were redesigned in order to reduce the length of the amplification product compared with the conventional design. The new amplification primers were applied to highly degraded casework samples, which gave no or only weak results for D2 in previous analyses. The application of the new primers resulted in an increased overall typing success rate. In a concordance study between the conventional and the newly designed primers, no genotype differences were revealed in 503 randomly selected individuals. This suggests robust amplification conditions with respect to mutation-based allele drop-out.