Comparison of Identifiler®, Identifiler Plus® and Minifiler® performance in an initial paternity testing study on old skeletal remains at the forensic and legal medicine area of the Government of Andorra (Pyrenees)

(ENG) The problem oftentimes faced by forensic scientists when working with DNA extracted from exhumations and skeletal remains is either DNA degradation or DNA contamination. Various methods have been used to improve the identification of skeletal remains using DNA technology. Most of these systems include short tandem repeat (STR) analyses. Herein, we describe our work on the identification of individuals involved in a paternity test where all parents, the mother and the two alleged fathers, had died between 10 and 58 years ago. Trace amounts of highly degraded human DNA were successfully extracted from each bone. Despite the presence of DNA inhibitors in the amplification, microsatellite alleles could be reproducibly amplified from the femur. DNA was extracted from bone which was turned into fine powder, then proteolytic digestion followed by phenol/chloroform purification and Centricon®-100 filtration took place. Our experience indicated that the AmpFlSTR® MiniFiler? used as a complement to the AmpFlSTR® Identifiler Plus' Kit forms an extremely sensitive multiplex STR amplification system. It has been successfully used to obtain multilocus STR profiles from bone samples with minimal amounts of human DNA. We report on the genotyping results obtained from each kit and the biomathematical results of paternity testing.