The

authors declare no conflict of interest. The work at Yale was funded primarily by Grants 2007-DN-BX-K197, 2010-DN-BX-K225 and 2013-DN-BX-K023 to KKK awarded by the National Institute of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, U.S. Department of Justice. Points of view in this document are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice. We also want to thank all the collaborators who helped to collect the population samples. BGB324 mw Cell lines for some of the populations were obtained from the National Laboratory for the Genetics of Israeli populations at Tel-Aviv University and the Coriell Cell Repositories, Camden, NJ. Special thanks go to the thousands of individuals who volunteered to give blood samples for studies of gene frequency variation. Some of the software calculations for this project were carried out on the Louise cpu cluster at the Yale University Biomedical High Performance Computing

Center which is supported by NIH grants RR19895 and RR029676-01. “
“Massively parallel sequencing (MPS) technologies hold great potential for efforts to expand forensic mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) typing beyond current capabilities. Since the first such technology was introduced in 2005 [1], MPS has transformed genetic data generation in many fields of research, including ancient DNA (for an overview of some ancient DNA studies that have used MPS, see Table 1 in Knapp and Hofreiter [2]; and for a review of the application Racecadotril of MPS to mtDNA sequencing in particular, see Ho and Gilbert [3] selleck products and Paijmans et al. [4]). The advantages of MPS in comparison to traditional

Sanger-type sequencing that have been exploited for analyses of ancient samples also have clear relevance to the low DNA quantity and/or quality specimens to which mtDNA typing is often applied in forensics, where typically only the control region (CR) or portions thereof are targeted due to both limited sample quantities and the enormous cost and effort required to generate Sanger-based profiles to forensic standards. Recent studies have demonstrated both that (1) MPS can effectively recover complete mitochondrial genome (mtGenome) profiles even from highly damaged and degraded forensic samples [5] and [6], and (2) that full mtGenome sequencing by MPS may be cost-effective in comparison to methods currently used by the forensic community for mtDNA data generation [7]. While much further work remains before MPS-based protocols (whether for mtGenome or nuclear genome typing) can be fully validated for forensic use and routinely applied to forensic casework specimens, the ongoing research into MPS for forensic application in many laboratories [5], [6], [7], [8], [9], [10], [11], [12], [13], [14], [15], [16], [17], [18] and [19] clearly indicates the direction in which the field is moving.