Searching for related contributors to a DNA mixture using single cell analysis

Abstract

We propose a staged process for assessing the presence of related individuals in an autosomal STR DNA mixture sample, when it is analysed using a single cell pipeline analysis (as opposed to a bulk mixture analysis). In the absence of a large dataset if single cells from real related people, artificial single cell data is generated by sampling individual locus data taken from single cell dataset of real unrelated people. It is applied to create random admixtures used in a relatedness search for pairs of individuals to illustrate the usefulness of the method.