FORENSIC SCIENCES A Compendium of Human Mitochondrial DNA Control Region: Development of an International Standard Forensic Database

A compendium of human mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) control region types has been constructed. This updated compilation indexes over 10,000 population-specific mtDNA nucleotide sequences in a standardized format. The se-quences represent mtDNA types from the Scientific Working Group on DNA Analysis Methods (SWGDAM) mtDNA database and from the public literature. The SWGDAM data are considered to be of higher quality than the public data, particularly for counting the number of times a particular haplotype has been observed. Key words: base sequence; databases, factual; DNA; DNA, mitochondrial; forensic medicine; gene frequency; genetics, pop-ulation; molecular sequence data; United States The analysis of the first and second hypervariable segments (HV1 and HV2) of the control region of hu-man mitochondrial genome (mtDNA) has proven to be a useful tool for forensic identification (1), medical genetics (2), population (3) and evolutionary studies (4), and anthropological reconstruction (5). A concor-dance (ie, a compilation/compendium) of nucleotide substitutions in HV1 and HV2 was first constructed in 1996 (6) and made available via the Interne