In this study, the authors developed a Universal STR Allele Toolkit (USAT) for TR haplotype analysis, which takes TR haplotype output from existing tools to perform allele size conversion, sequence comparison of haplotypes, figure plotting, comparison for allele distribution, and interactive visualization.
In the current project, an exemplary application of USAT for analysis of the CODIS core STR loci for DNA forensics with benchmarking human individuals demonstrated the capabilities of USAT. USAT has user-friendly graphic interfaces and runs fast in major computing operating systems with parallel computing enabled. The current project concluded that USAT is a user-friendly bioinformatics software for interpretation, visualization, and comparisons of TRs. (Publisher abstract provided)