LARGE-SCALE DATABASE EXPERIMENTS TO ASSESS THE SIGNIFICANCE OF MATCHING DNA PROFILES

Over 5,700 three-probe VNTR DNA profiles collected by several United K ingdom (UK) laboratories have been compared to examine the probability of randomly matching 2 samples from different individuals. In over 16 million comparisons, using a matching rule corresponding to the match ing guideline employed by the UK Forensic Science Service, no profiles were found to match at the 3 loci D1S7 (MS1), D7S21(MS31) and D12S11 (MS43a). The frequency of occurrence of a set of Caucasian profiles ha ve been estimated with 6 reference databases. The results show that th ere were greater differences in the frequency estimates when using a d atabase of Afro-Caribbean or Asian profiles, rather than a different C aucasian database. The results further demonstrate the power and robus tness of the VNTR DNA profiling technique for forensic casework.