Nuclear STR and Mitochondrial DNA Recovery from Indoor Air: Post-Occupancy Delay and Workflow Comparisons

This repository contains supporting data and supplementary materials for the manuscript “Nuclear STR and Mitochondrial DNA Recovery from Indoor Air: Post-Occupancy Delay and Workflow Comparisons.” The study evaluated 41 air-filter samples collected from a controlled, non-ventilated 15-m³ room following documented human occupancy or under background/post-cleaning conditions. Method A comprised 30-min glass-fibre filtration and capillary electrophoresis-based STR profiling; Method B comprised 80-min filtration, primarily through cotton, and massively parallel sequencing-based STR profiling. Both workflows included mitochondrial DNA control-region sequencing. No individuals were present during filtration. The deposited materials include sampling conditions, sample-level results, DNA quantification and sequencing reports, control reports, supplementary tables and figures, population-database query records, exploratory frequency calculations, and probabilistic-genotyping analyses with associated scripts and sensitivity outputs. Together, these materials document nuclear and mitochondrial DNA recovery, reference compatibility, mixture characteristics, and relationships with preceding occupancy and sampling delay. Primary autosomal analyses used an assumed population-substructure parameter of (FST=0.03); no additional adjustment was applied to Y-STR or mtDNA database estimates. Frequency-based scores and probabilistic-genotyping results remain exploratory. The latter used MPSproto tutorial calibration and a surrogate population database rather than a laboratory-validated interpretation framework. These materials support evaluation of this controlled study and do not establish validated forensic source attribution.