International Journal of Legal Medicine

, Volume 104, Issue 5, pp 307–308 | Cite as

On the statistics of the “genetic fingerprint”

  • H. Ritter
Short Communications
  • 26 Downloads

Summary

In analogy to the polygene determined morphological features, the DNA-fingerprint is also not suitable for statistical processing. Statements about the individuality are merely speculative. Frequencies of genes cannot be found, since it is impossible to determine which combinations of bands belong to one gene locus. Hence the DNA fingerprint enables the recognition of exclusions from paternity; it does not, however, allow a statistical analysis, no matter which method be employed.

Key words

Statistics Fingerprint Probability of band sharing Individuality 

Zusammenfassung

Wie die polygen gesteuerten morphologischen Merkmale ist der „genetische Fingerabdruck” statistisch nicht analysierbar. Angaben über die Individualität sind daher rein spekulativ, da nicht bekannt ist, welche Banden zu einem Locus gehören. Der Fingerprint erlaubt damit lediglich die Erkennung von Ausschlußkonstellationen.

Schlüsselwörter

Statistik Fingerabdruck Bandsharing Individualität 

References

  1. Jeffreys AJ, Brookfield JFY, Semeonoff R (1985) Possible identification of an immigration test-case using human DNA-fragments. Nature 317: 818–819PubMedGoogle Scholar
  2. Schäfer R, Zischler H, Birsner U, Becker A, Epplen JT (1988) Optimized oligonucleotide probes for DNA fingerprinting. Electrophoresis 9: 369–374PubMedGoogle Scholar

Copyright information

© Springer-Verlag 1991

Authors and Affiliations

  • H. Ritter
    • 1
  1. 1.Institut für Anthropologie und HumangenetikUniversität TübingenTübingenGermany

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