Initial assessment of the Precision ID Globalfiler Mixture ID panel on the Ion Torrent S5XL DNA sequencer and Converge v2.0 software

The U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) participated in an assessment of the Precision ID Globalfiler early access Mixture ID Panel (v1.0), which consists of primers for amplification of over 100 forensically relevant loci in the human genome. Markers included in the panel can be divided into four classes: Short Tandem Repeats (STR) (29 autosomal STRs and 1 Y STR), single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) (42 autosomal and two Y chromosome), insertion/deletion polymorphisms (Indels) (Amelogenin and Y Indel rs2032678), and microhaplotype blocks (MH) (36 clusters of two to four SNPs). Several challenging sample types were sequenced and analyzed, including: artificially degraded DNA, multiple-contributor mixtures, mixtures of related individuals, and picogram input amounts of DNA. Performance characteristics, in the form of mixture deconvolution outcomes and likelihood ratio calculations, for the Mixture ID Panel STRs relative to state-of-the-art capillary electrophoresis methods are presented here.