Abstract
Fifteen autosomal short tandem repeat (STR) markers [D8S1179, D21S11, D7S820, CSF1PO, D3S1358, THO1, D13S317, D16S539, D2S1338, D19S433, vWA, TPOX, D18S51, D5S818 and FGA] were analyzed in 501 unrelated, randomly selected Turkish Cypriot individuals from the island of Cyprus. While no locus duplications or null alleles were detected in these samples, eight allelic variants were observed in total, 75% of which were intermediate allelic variants that were absent in the system allelic ladder. Allelic frequencies and statistical parameters of forensic interest were calculated at each locus. For the 15 STR loci tested, combined matching probability (pM) was 2.15717 × 10(-18) and combined power of exclusion (PE) was 0.9999995213. No deviations from the Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium were observed, except for the vWA locus, which became insignificant after the Bonferroni correction for multiple testing. Locus-by-locus comparisons of the Turkish Cypriot allelic frequencies with those published for the neighboring and/or historically related populations with similar loci coverage (Turkish, Greek, Greek Cypriot, Italian and Lebanese) revealed some statistically significant differences at one to five loci. In general, an increase in the number of such significant differences between the Turkish Cypriot data and those for other populations correlated closely with an increase in the geographic distance and/or a decrease in the amount of historical contact. The Turkish Cypriot autosomal STR population study will find immediate use in the Committee on Missing Persons in Cyprus Project on the “Exhumation, Identification and Return of Remains of Missing Persons” and it will also be available for criminal, parentage and other missing person investigations.