Today’s blog is written by guest blogger, Douglas R. Storts, PhD, head of Research, Nucleic Acid Technologies, Promega Corporation.
Massively parallel sequencing (MPS), also called next generation sequencing (NGS), has the potential to alleviate some of the biggest challenges facing forensic laboratories, namely degraded DNA and samples containing DNA from multiple contributors. Unlike capillary electrophoresis, MPS genotyping methods do not require fluorescently-labeled oligonucleotides to distinguish amplification products of similar size. Furthermore, it is not necessary to design primers within a color channel to generate amplicons of different sizes to avoid allele overlap. Consequently, all the amplicons can be of a similar, small size (typically <275 base pairs). The small size of the amplicons is particularly advantageous when working with degraded DNA. Because the alleles are distinguished by the number of repeats and the DNA sequence, additional information can be derived from a sample. This can be especially important when genotyping mixtures. As previously demonstrated (1), this sequence variation can help distinguish stutter “peaks” from minor contributor alleles.
Because there is no reliance upon size and fluorescent label, significantly greater multiplexing is possible with MPS approaches. In addition to autosomal short tandem repeats (STRs), we can also sequence Y-STRs, single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), and the mitochondrial DNA control region. The advantage to this approach is the forensic analyst does not need a priori knowledge whether a sample would benefit most from the different methods of genotyping.
Despite these major advantages, there are limitations to the near-term, broad deployment of current MPS technology into forensic laboratories. The limitations fall into four main categories: Workflow, costs, performance with forensically-relevant samples, and community guidelines. Continue reading “Massively Parallel Sequencing for Forensic DNA Analysis”
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