Development of a SNP-based panel for human identification for Indian populations.

The widely employed short tandem repeat (STR)-based panels for forensic human identification (HID) have limitations while dealing with challenging forensic samples involving DNA degradation, resulting in dropping-out of higher molecular weight alleles/loci. To address this issue, bialleic markers like single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) and insertion-deletions (indels), which can be scored even when the template DNA is heavily degraded (<100bp), have been suggested as alternative markers for HID testing. Recent studies have highlighted their utility in forensic HID and several panels based on biallelic markers have been described for worldwide populations. However, there has been very little information about the behavior of such DNA markers in Indian populations, which is known to possess great genetic diversity. This study describes a two-step approach for designing a SNP-based panel consisting of 70 SNPs for HID testing in Indian populations. In the first step, candidate SNPs were shortlisted from public databases by screening them for several criteria including allelic distribution, genomic location, potential phenotypic expression or functionality and species specificity. The second step involved genotyping the shortlisted SNPs in various Indian populations followed by shortlisting of the best performers for identity-testing. Starting with 592,652 SNPs listed in Human660W-Quad Beadchip (Illumina Inc.), we shortlisted 275 candidate SNPs for identity-testing and genotyped them in 462 unrelated individuals from different population groups in India. Post genotyping and statistical analyses based on biogeographic regions, 206 SNPs demonstrated desired allelic distribution (Heterozygosity≥0.4 and FST ≤0.02), from which 2-4 widely separated (>20 Mb apart) SNPs from each chromosome were finally selected to construct a panel of 70 SNPs. This panel on average possessed match probability 10e-29 and probability of paternity of 0.99999997, which was orders of magnitude higher than most of the currently employed STR-based chemistries and SNP-based panels that were proposed previously for HID testing. For comparison purpose, genotyping previously reported SNPs for HID in our samples led us to conclude that the panel developed in this study is much more efficient and robust and better suited for the Indian populations.