Allele distributions and genetic relationship with 13 CODIS core STR loci in various Asian populations in or near Japan

We calculated allele frequencies for 13 Combined DNA Index System (CODIS) core short tandem repeat (STR) loci using each more than 100 DNA samples in two Japanese, six Chinese, one Korean, one Thai and one Burmese populations. We analyzed these allele frequency distributions by genetic distance DA to construct a tree based on the neighbor-joining method, and obtained one that is well coincident with their geographical distributions. We also present a genetic relationship including the published ethnic data in the world. D 2003 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.