Application of Autosomal SNPs and Indels in Forensic Analysis.

The potential applications of short binary markers to forensic analysis are reviewed. Short binary markers are the most common human genomic variation and include single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) and insertion/deletion polymorphisms (Indels). This review outlines their use and performance in typing highly degraded DNA - the original rationale for developing SNPs for forensic analysis - as well as their ability to infer the ancestry or likely pigmentation characteristics of an individual not present on a national DNA database, thus potentially providing investigative leads. Throughout the review, reference is made to short Indels as a new and potentially powerful alternative to SNPs for enhancing short tandem repeat (STR) results by using a simple amplification to capillary electrophoresis (PCR-to-CE) technique that retains the direct relationship between input DNA and signal strength, offering much improved mixture-detection capabilities while retaining the favorable characteristics of short amplicon PCR.