MtDNA control region and RFLP data for Sicily and France

The forensic application of mtDNA typing requires large databases which are regionally well defined. To further this aim, we have typed mtDNA in a sam ple of III French and 106 Sicilians. The French were typed for both hyperva riable segments (HVR1 and HVR2) of the mtDNA control region, whereas the Si cilians were only typed for HVR1, but in addition for the coding region RFL P markers for mtDNA groups H, I, J, K, L, M, T, U, V and X. In both samples , the predominant sequence type by far was the Cambridge reference sequence . Comparing HVR1 sequences, we found that the French sample was twice as di verse as the Sicilian sample as measured by sequence matches. A further set of sequence match comparisons including the French, Sicilian, and the publ ished British mtDNA samples, demonstrate that sequence matching probabiliti es within samples differ by less than a factor of 2 from the matching proba bilities between samples.