Investigation of paternity establishing without the putative father using hypervariable DNA probes.

Seven kinds of DNA probes which recognize hypervariable loci were applied for paternity test. The putative father was decreased and unavailable for the test. The two legitimate children and their mother (the deceased's wife) and the four illegitimate children and their mother (the deceased's kept mistress) were available for analysis. Paternity index of four illegitimate child was investigated. Allelic frequencies and their confidence intervals among unrelated Japanese individuals were previously reported from our laboratory, and co-dominant segregation of the polymorphism was confirmed in family studies. Cumulative paternity indices of four illegitimate children from 16 kinds of standard blood group markers were 165, 42, 0.09, and 36, respectively. On the other hand, cumulative paternity indices from 7 kinds of DNA probes are 2,363, 4,685, 57,678, and 54,994, respectively, which are 14, 113, 640, 864, and 1,509 times higher than that from standard blood group markers. The DNA analyses gave nearly conclusive evidence that the putative father was the biological father of the children. Especially, the paternity relation of the third illegitimate child could not be established without the DNA analyses. Accordingly, DNA polymorphism is considered to be informative enough for paternity test.