Skip to main content
PMC home page
Genetics logoLink to Genetics
. 1988 Mar;118(3):527–536. doi: 10.1093/genetics/118.3.527

Parentage Analysis with Genetic Markers in Natural Populations. I. the Expected Proportion of Offspring with Unambiguous Paternity

R Chakraborty 1, T R Meagher 1, P E Smouse 1
PMCID: PMC1203306  PMID: 3163316

Abstract

Recent studies indicate that polymorphic genetic markers are potentially helpful in resolving genealogical relationships among individuals in a natural population. Genetic data provide opportunities for paternity exclusion when genotypic incompatibilities are observed among individuals, and the present investigation examines the resolving power of genetic markers in unambiguous positive determination of paternity. Under the assumption that the mother for each offspring in a population is unambiguously known, an analytical expression for the fraction of males excluded from paternity is derived for the case where males and females may be derived from two different gene pools. This theoretical formulation can also be used to predict the fraction of births for each of which all but one male can be excluded from paternity. We show that even when the average probability of exclusion approaches unity, a substantial fraction of births yield equivocal mother-father-offspring determinations. The number of loci needed to increase the frequency of unambiguous determinations to a high level is beyond the scope of current electrophoretic studies in most species. Applications of this theory to electrophoretic data on Chamaelirium luteum (L.) shows that in 2255 offspring derived from 273 males and 70 females, only 57 triplets could be unequivocally determined with eight polymorphic protein loci, even though the average combined exclusionary power of these loci was 73%. The distribution of potentially compatible male parents, based on multilocus genotypes, was reasonably well predicted from the allele frequency data available for these loci. We demonstrate that genetic paternity analysis in natural populations cannot be reliably based on exclusionary principles alone. In order to measure the reproductive contributions of individuals in natural populations, more elaborate likelihood principles must be deployed.

Full Text

The Full Text of this article is available as a PDF (946.5 KB).

Selected References

These references are in PubMed. This may not be the complete list of references from this article.

  1. Aickin M. Some fallacies in the computation of paternity probabilities. Am J Hum Genet. 1984 Jul;36(4):904–915. [PMC free article] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
  2. BOYD W. C. Tables and nomogram for calculating chances of excluding paternity. Am J Hum Genet. 1954 Dec;6(4):426–433. [PMC free article] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
  3. Burke T., Bruford M. W. DNA fingerprinting in birds. Nature. 1987 May 14;327(6118):149–152. doi: 10.1038/327149a0. [DOI] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
  4. Chakraborty R., Schull W. J. A note on the distribution of the number of exclusions to be expected in paternity testing. Am J Hum Genet. 1976 Nov;28(6):615–618. [PMC free article] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
  5. Cooper D. N., Schmidtke J. DNA restriction fragment length polymorphisms and heterozygosity in the human genome. Hum Genet. 1984;66(1):1–16. doi: 10.1007/BF00275182. [DOI] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
  6. Elston R. C. Probability and paternity testing. Am J Hum Genet. 1986 Jul;39(1):112–122. [PMC free article] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
  7. Hanken J., Sherman P. W. Multiple paternity in Belding's ground squirrel litters. Science. 1981 Apr 17;212(4492):351–353. doi: 10.1126/science.7209536. [DOI] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
  8. Hill W. G. DNA fingerprints applied to animal and bird populations. Nature. 1987 May 14;327(6118):98–99. doi: 10.1038/327098a0. [DOI] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
  9. Jeffreys A. J., Morton D. B. DNA fingerprints of dogs and cats. Anim Genet. 1987;18(1):1–15. doi: 10.1111/j.1365-2052.1987.tb00739.x. [DOI] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
  10. Jeffreys A. J., Wilson V., Kelly R., Taylor B. A., Bulfield G. Mouse DNA 'fingerprints': analysis of chromosome localization and germ-line stability of hypervariable loci in recombinant inbred strains. Nucleic Acids Res. 1987 Apr 10;15(7):2823–2836. doi: 10.1093/nar/15.7.2823. [DOI] [PMC free article] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
  11. Jeffreys A. J., Wilson V., Thein S. L. Individual-specific 'fingerprints' of human DNA. Nature. 1985 Jul 4;316(6023):76–79. doi: 10.1038/316076a0. [DOI] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
  12. Maccluer J. W., Schull W. J. On the Estimation of the Frequency of Nonpaternity. Am J Hum Genet. 1963 Jun;15(2):191–202. [PMC free article] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
  13. McCracken G. F., Bradbury J. W. Paternity and Genetic Heterogeneity in the Polygynous Bat, Phyllostomus hastatus. Science. 1977 Oct 21;198(4314):303–306. doi: 10.1126/science.198.4314.303. [DOI] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
  14. Mickey M. R., Gjertson D. W., Terasaki P. I. Empirical validation of the Essen-Möller probability of paternity. Am J Hum Genet. 1986 Jul;39(1):123–132. [PMC free article] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
  15. Selvin S. Probability of nonpaternity determined by multiple allele codominant systems. Am J Hum Genet. 1980 Mar;32(2):276–278. [PMC free article] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
  16. Smouse P. E., Chakraborty R. The use of restriction fragment length polymorphisms in paternity analysis. Am J Hum Genet. 1986 Jun;38(6):918–939. [PMC free article] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
  17. Thompson E. A. Likelihood inference of paternity. Am J Hum Genet. 1986 Aug;39(2):285–287. [PMC free article] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
  18. Thompson E. A. The estimation of pairwise relationships. Ann Hum Genet. 1975 Oct;39(2):173–188. doi: 10.1111/j.1469-1809.1975.tb00120.x. [DOI] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
  19. Valentin J. Paternity index and attribution of paternity. Hum Hered. 1984;34(4):255–257. doi: 10.1159/000153473. [DOI] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
  20. Wetton J. H., Carter R. E., Parkin D. T., Walters D. Demographic study of a wild house sparrow population by DNA fingerprinting. Nature. 1987 May 14;327(6118):147–149. doi: 10.1038/327147a0. [DOI] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]

Articles from Genetics are provided here courtesy of Oxford University Press

RESOURCES