Gotaro Watanabe

Amplified product length polymorphism (APLP): a novel strategy for genotyping the ABO blood group

Abstract We present a simple rapid reproducible polymerase chain reaction based technique, termed amplified product length polymorphism (APLP), as a new strategy for primer design for ABO genotyping. The method involves the use of primers differing in length and permits the identification of the major ABO genotypes (A1, A2, B, OA, OG, and O2) according to the molecular size of the allele-specific amplified products. Ten different primers designed to analyze the variations in nucleotide positions 261, 297, 796, 802, and 1059–1061 of cDNA are mixed in one reaction, and the amplified products are resolved on a polyacrylamide gel. Of eight PCR fragments (132 bp, 120 bp, 108 bp, 98 bp, 88 bp, 80 bp, 72 bp, and 64 bp), two to five are amplified in the reaction according to ABO genotypes. The new technique has been successfully applied to the genotyping of 221 peripheral blood samples from Japanese and Germans whose ABO phenotypes had previously been determined; a novel A allele (AG) was found in Japanese individuals.

Multiplex amplified product-length polymorphism analysis for rapid detection of human mitochondrial DNA variations

A number of mutations in coding and noncoding regions of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) have previously been studied. In the present study, we simultaneously typed six mutation sites in the coding region by use of amplified product‐length polymorphism (APLP) analysis. The mtDNA variations of 2471 individuals from 20 populations of Japanese, Korean, Chinese, and German were examined and classified into 18 haplotypes. Two of these haplotypes, B1 (estimated ancestral haplotype) and C1, were distributed among all populations tested. However, the haplotypes A1, A2, B2, B3, and C2 were mostly restricted to the Mongoloid populations, whereas haplotypes B5 and C5 appeared almost exclusively in the German population. Phylogenetic analysis by the neighbor‐joining method revealed that the Japanese populations were more closely related to each other than to the other East Asian populations surveyed. The multiplex APLP method is suitable for large‐scale screening studies of mtDNA variability because it is both rapid and economical.

DXS10011: a hypervariable tetranucleotide STR polymorphism on the X chromosome.

The locus DXS10011 is a polymorphic system with a tetranucleotide repeat sequence located on the human X chromosome. The distribution of allele frequencies was examined in 334 Japanese and 171 German individuals and a total of 36 alleles was detected in the two population groups. This STR polymorphism will be a useful marker for linkage analysis.

MATP polymorphisms in Germans and Japanese: the L374F mutation as a population marker for Caucasoids

Inference of the population and ancestry to which an individual belongs is important in forensic individualization and personal identification. In this study, five polymorphisms of the membrane-associated transporter protein (MATP) gene were investigated in German and Japanese populations. The L374F mutation was present at an allele frequency as high as 0.96 in the German population, whereas it was completely absent in the Japanese population. This extreme difference in allele frequency suggests that the L374F mutation is valuable as a population and ancestry informative marker for Caucasoids.

DNA sequence analysis of long PCR amplified products at the D1S80 locus

Several PCR amplified products of larger alleles than 41 were observed frequently in D1S80 typing. These long alleles have rarely been analyzed. A total of seven amplified products of larger alleles than 41 at D1S80 were selected for sequence analysis. From the results, all of the samples have a repeat of only 16 base pairs in size, without the first repeat unit. In this study, the largest allele was determined to be the allele 72.

Determination of the HUMTH01 alleles by the APLP method.

Abstract We present a simple and rapid technique for determination of alleles at the HUMTH01 locus. The amplified product length polymorphism (APLP) method using two primers different in length, permits the differentiation between allele 9.3 and other alleles. The primers were designed to have an allele-specific nucleotide at the 3′ terminal and 11 non-complementary nucleotides were added to the 5′ terminal of one of the primers for the allele 9.3. The amplified fragment sizes for the alleles 9.3 and 10 were 80 bp and 70 bp, respectively. This method has proved to be very useful for forensic applications.

The art of traditional native PAGE: The APLP 48-ID assay for human identification

When full STR profiles cannot be obtained, further DNA analyses targeting single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) may occasionally yield valuable information. Although the discrimination power of each SNP is relatively low, combined analysis of many SNPs can improve the personal identification ability to a level as high as that of commercial STR typing kits. In this study, we developed a new SNP typing method, named the amplified-product length polymorphism (APLP) 48-ID assay, for genotyping of 47 autosomal SNPs and two X and Y chromosomal markers for sex typing. Forty-seven SNPs were selected from all 22 autosomes, showing high diversity in European, Nigerian, Han Chinese, and Japanese population in the HapMap data. PCR primers were designed to generate amplicons 40-100 bp in length to increase the robustness of the PCR. The APLP 48-ID assay consisted of four independent PCR reactions followed by electrophoretic run on four lanes in a polyacrylamide gel. Complete profiles were obtained when more than 1.2 ng of DNA was used. We applied this assay for genotyping of 236 Japanese individuals. The random matching probability was 3.3E-20, and the power of exclusion was greater than 0.9999999. This method is a rapid, robust, and cost-effective approach for human identification and paternity testing.