ABSTRACT
Capillary electrophoresis (CE) instrumentation is one of the most notable developments in the forensic DNA typing workow, perhaps second only to the invention of the polymerase chain reaction (PCR). e occurrence of regions containing repeat sequences within the DNA molecule and their polymorphic nature was discovered in the early 1980s. Within a span of a few years, Jereys et al. demonstrated the use of regions containing a variable number of tandem repeats (VNTR) for human identication (Jereys et al. 1985a and 1985b). Subsequently, in the 1990s, highly polymorphic short tandem repeat (STR) markers replaced VNTRs. Initially amplied STR fragments were separated using slab-gel electrophoresis and detected by silver staining. Inventions in uorescent dyes, uorescence detection, and multiplex PCR paved the way to the currently used STR typing protocols (Fregeau and Fourney 1993; Micka et al. 1996; Ricci et al. 2000; Sullivan et al. 1992; Wang et al. 1995). A CCT triplex system was successfully developed in the early 1990s for simultaneous amplication of CSF1PO, TPOX, and THO1 loci (Micka et al. 1996). Multiplexing allowed simultaneous separation and detection of multiple amplied fragments in one lane and now in one capillary. Polyacrylamide gel-based sequencers like the ABI PRISM 373 DNA Sequencer and ABI PRISM 377 DNA Sequencer were routinely used for STR analysis for more than a decade, even aer development of a single capillary instrument, as the 96 lanes conferred high-throughput capability (Frazier et al. 1996; Kimpton et al. 1996). CE instruments with capillary arrays have since replaced these gel-based sequencers in almost all forensic laboratories. e term CE in this chapter refers to both capillary electrophoresis and capillary-array electrophoresis. CE results have been admissible in courts of law since 1996 (Kuner et al. 1996).
