TY - JOUR U1 - Wissenschaftlicher Artikel A1 - Poethe, Sara-Sophie A1 - Holtel, Julia A1 - Biermann, Jan-Philip A1 - Riemer, Trine A1 - Grabmüller, Melanie A1 - Madea, Burkhard A1 - Thiele, Ralf A1 - Jäger, Richard T1 - Cost-Effective Next Generation Sequencing-Based STR Typing with Improved Analysis of Minor, Degraded and Inhibitor-Containing DNA Samples JF - International Journal of Molecular Sciences N2 - Forensic DNA profiles are established by multiplex PCR amplification of a set of highly variable short tandem repeat (STR) loci followed by capillary electrophoresis (CE) as a means to assign alleles to PCR products of differential length. Recently, CE analysis of STR amplicons has been supplemented by high-throughput next generation sequencing (NGS) techniques that are able to detect isoalleles bearing sequence polymorphisms and allow for an improved analysis of degraded DNA. Several such assays have been commercialised and validated for forensic applications. However, these systems are cost-effective only when applied to high numbers of samples. We report here an alternative, cost-efficient shallow-sequence output NGS assay called maSTR assay that, in conjunction with a dedicated bioinformatics pipeline called SNiPSTR, can be implemented with standard NGS instrumentation. In a back-to-back comparison with a CE-based, commercial forensic STR kit, we find that for samples with low DNA content, with mixed DNA from different individuals, or containing PCR inhibitors, the maSTR assay performs equally well, and with degraded DNA is superior to CE-based analysis. Thus, the maSTR assay is a simple, robust and cost-efficient NGS-based STR typing method applicable for human identification in forensic and biomedical contexts. KW - massive parallel sequencing KW - DNA profile KW - degraded DNA KW - PCR inhibitors KW - next generation sequencing KW - bioinformatics KW - short tandem repeat KW - forensic KW - high-throughput sequencing Y1 - 2023 UN - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:hbz:1044-opus-66045 SN - 1422-0067 SS - 1422-0067 U6 - https://doi.org/10.3390/ijms24043382 DO - https://doi.org/10.3390/ijms24043382 PM - 36834791 VL - 24 IS - 4 SP - 17 S1 - 17 PB - MDPI CY - Basel ER -