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Principles of Forensic DNA for Officers of the Court

Haplotypes

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Y-STR loci, unlike autosomal STR markers, are not independent of one another due to the lack of recombination along most of the chromosome's length and are co-inherited as extended haplotypes of linked markers. The estimation of the frequency of occurrence of a particular haplotype therefore necessitates the use of a counting method, which is entirely dependent on the size of the database. This is similar to the situation with mtDNA testing.

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