Using a panel of ten microsatellites has a probability of producing a false match between two randomly selected individuals of less than 1 in 1,000 million.
One possible explanation of this phenomenon is that long microsatellites have a mutational bias that favors contractions over expansions.
Because microsatellites have a high mutation rate and bi-parental inheritance, they can offer more detailed population genetic insight than maternally inherited mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA).
Microsatellites have a high specificity in identification of Leishmania infections owing to their allelic characters [ 37].
All identified microsatellites have a minimum length of 15 bp (see Material and Methods).
By chance, the selected microsatellites had a wide range of Δ msat values.
Weber [ 10] estimated that, about 10% of the human microsatellites have a composite motif.
These results suggest that sequence properties of microsatellites have a significant impact in determining the features of human microsatellite variability.
The stepwise approach we applied, using 5 instead of 17 microsatellites, had a similar discriminatory power for detecting unrelated infections.
In general, microsatellites have a high mutation rate (10-2 10-6) as compared to point mutations in coding genes [ 4].
