Study to compare three commercial Y-STR testing kits

Abstract An evaluation study was carried out to test the performance of three commercially available Y-STR DNA profiling kits for their suitability to forensic case work. The three kits assessed were Reliagene's Y-Plex™ 12 kit, Promega's PowerPlex® Y system and Applied Biosystems' AmpFlSTR® Yfiler™ kit. Four experiments were devised to assess the performance of the three kits. Allelic peak height data was used to measure the reproducibility, sensitivity, male specificity and ability to discriminate male mixtures of the three kits. Samples were processed following the manufacturers recommended protocols. PCR products were run on 3100 electrophoresis platforms and the resultant DNA profiles analysed using GeneScan and Genotyper analysis software packages. All three kits gave reproducible results with concordant genotypes between replicates and kits. Average peak height data showed the AmpFlSTR® Yfiler™ kit to be the most reproducible kit during the evaluation study. PowerPlex® Y system was shown to be the most sensitive kit during the evaluation study. All three kits gave full male profiles for all samples processed in the specificity experiment. There was no evidence of female artefacts in the PowerPlex® Y and AmpFlSTR® Yfiler™ samples; however, there was evidence of additional female artefacts in all Y-Plex™ 12 samples. The AmpFlSTR® Yfiler™ kit showed the least degree of variation in peak area ratio's for the expected male mixture ratio's and therefore showed that it was able to discriminate male mixtures better than the PowerPlex® Y and Y-Plex™ 12 kits during this evaluation study.