Genetic polymorphism of 30 autosomal InDel loci in Chinese Hainan Li population

Abstract A novel genetic marker, Insertion/Deletion polymorphism (InDel) shows remarkable potential for forensic DNA applications. Hainan Island is the southernmost and the second largest island in China, of which the Li ethnic group is regarded as the original inhabitants. In this study, 207 individual samples of Li ethnic group from Hainan were genotyped using Investigator DIPplex kit which contains 30 autosomal InDels and Amelogenin. Allele frequency and forensic parameters were calculated for these loci. Several deviations from Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium (HWE) and linkage disequilibrium (LD) may indicate founder effect in the Li ethnic group. The combined power of discrimination (CPD) and the cumulative probability of exclusion (CPE) reached 0.99999999992912 and 0.9861, respectively. These results suggested that the kit was effective for personal identification in Hainan Li population. The population comparisons through the Nei’s standard genetic distance (Rst), phylogenetic tree, multidimensional scaling analysis (MDS), principal component analysis (PCA), and STRUCTURE analyses along continental divisions manifested that the 30 InDels panel had a certain intercontinental differentiation ability.