Department of Forensic Medicine and Institute of Forensic Medicine, Seoul National University College of Medicine, Seoul, Korea. sdlee@snu.ac.kr

Recently forensic scientists have focused on extending the applicability of STR to degraded or tiny amount DNA. Short amplicon may be one of the solutions to these samples and several commercial kits are available for this purpose. Before practical casework, validation is necessary for newly introduced kit. We tried to check how newly introduced STR kit, AmpFℓSTR® MiniFiler^TM PCR Amplification Kit, reacts with some animal DNAs. We tried 27 animal DNA samples and checked whether the above kit amplify animal DNA, and next how the band appears on electropherogram. We compared the results with popular STR kits. With AmpFℓSTR® MiniFiler^TM PCR Amplification Kit, we could get several bands on electropherogram for some species, but we could not designate proper allelic number compared to allelic ladder for most loci except the following loci, D13S317, D2S1338, D21S11, D18S51, FGA. The D18S51 locus was outstanding in that some species showed definite designated alleles, but the allelic number was not different depending on species. This was the same with another popular STR kit, AmpFℓSTR® Identifiler^TM PCR Amplification Kit, which was from the same company. The another kit from another company, PowerPlex® 16 System showed different phenomenon with more increased number of amplified bands which were usually differ on size when compared to allelic ladder.

Key words : Species Specificity, STR, Forensic, MiniFiler

Original article