Department of Legal Medicine, Kyoto University Graduate School of Medicine, Kyoto 606-8501, Japan. ktamaki@legal.med.kyoto-u.ac.jp
It has been 20 years since the first development of DNA fingerprinting and the start of forensic DNA typing. Ever since, human tandem repeat DNA sequences have been the main targets for forensic DNA analysis. These repeat sequences are classified into minisatellites (or VNTRs) and microsatellites (or STRs). In this brief review, we discuss the historical and current forensic applications of such tandem repeats.