Population Analysis of the ESS Loci and SE33 Locus in a Republica of Serbia

In previous population studies of Serbian human population, 15 STR loci included in the Identifiler were used. For further development of this dataset, we analyzed the new ESS loci and the SE33 locus. We tested 197 unrelated healthy individuals born in Serbia. Qiagen MicroTM Tissue Kit was used for DNA extraction from whole blood, Quantifiler assay for quantification and PowerPlex ESI 17 System for amplification and detection. Electrophoresis of the amplification products was preformed on an ABI PRISM 310. Numerical allele designations of the profiles were obtained by processing with Gene Mapper1 IDv 3.2 Software. Arlequin software, version 3.5.1.2, was used to calculate allele frequencies, observed heterozygosity (Ho), expected heterozygosity (He) and Pvalues of the Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium (HWE). Also, the same software was used for the exact population differentiation tests using allele frequencies. Matching probability (MP), power of discrimination (PD), polymorphism information content (PIC), probability of exclusion (PE) and typical paternity index (TPI) were determined by Powerstats, version 1.2. No statistically significant deviation (p < 0.05) from HWE was found, except for the D2S441 locus (0.0306), which was rejected after Bonferroni correction. Also, we have compared Serbian data with the data obtained from geographically closer (neighboring) European populations. Nei’s genetic distances among 10 European populations including this study were computed and a NJphylogenetic tree of 5 ESS STR loci for compared populations was built. It could be seen that, even using only 6 STR loci, “neighboring clustering” of the data could be recognized.