Genetic analysis of 12 X-STR loci in the Serbian population from Vojvodina Province.

The analysis of 12 X-STR loci included in the Investigator® Argus X-12 kit was performed on a sample of 325 unrelated persons from Vojvodina Province, Republic of Serbia. No significant differences were observed in the allele frequencies in males and females. Heterozygosity values among the studied loci ranged from 67.62 to 94.28%. All loci in female individuals were consistent with the Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium test. The combined power of discrimination values in male and female individuals was 0.9999999994 and 0.999999999999999, respectively. The combined mean exclusion chance was 0.999998 in deficiency cases, 0.9999999977 in normal trio cases, and 0.9999994 in duo cases. Loci DXS10135 and DXS10101 were found to be most polymorphic. The haplotype diversity was found to be greater than 0.993 for all linkage groups. The exact test for pairwise linkage disequilibrium for the 12 loci in the male samples showed significant linkage disequilibrium for the DXS10103-DXS10101 and DXS10134-DXS10146 pairs of loci. The results from the current study confirmed that the panel of 12 X-STR loci is highly polymorphic and informative and can be implemented as a powerful tool in deficient paternity testing and kinship analysis, as well as a useful complement tool of autosomal short tandem repeats (STRs) in forensic investigation. Population differentiation analyses indicated significant differences in genetic structure between the Serbian population and the geographically and ethno-linguistically distant populations, while genetic homogeneity was present in populations with similar geographic origin.