This article reports on a population sequencing study of 607 mitochondrial genomes (mtGenomes) undertaken by the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology in collaboration with the Armed Forces Medical Examiner System’s Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory.
The goal of the study is to increase the availability of high-quality whole mtGenome sequences for haplotype frequency estimations, enabling the increased discrimination power of the entire extranuclear genome to be used. Whole mtGenome sequencing is enabled by next generation sequencing workflows, which are vastly simplified compared to Sanger-type sequencing. The current article reports on an evaluation of the relative performance of mtGenome versus sequencing the control region of the mtGenome alone. (publisher abstract modified)