Polymorphism studies of six miniSTR loci for three ethnic populations in Singapore.

MiniSTR loci have been demonstrated to be an effective approach in recovering genetic information from degraded specimen, because of the improved PCR efficiency of their reduced PCR amplicon sizes. This study constructed two miniSTR panels comprising six miniSTR loci, including D2S1776, D3S4529, D6S474, D9S2157, D10S1435 and D12ATA63. The allele frequency distribution, forensic parameters and heterozygosity in three Singapore populations are reported in this paper. All six loci showed relatively high polymorphism with observed heterozygosity > 0.7. However, many of these six loci also demonstrated significant population differentiation for the three populations.