Allele frequencies determined by analysis of four polymorphic loci: APOB, D1S80, HUMTH01 and HUMVWA, in a restricted sample of 128 individuals from Serbia, are summarized in Table 1. Our results are in concordance with the data previously reported for various European populations [15-19].

To evaluate whether our population was in Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium, the c² test was conducted based on comparison of observed and expected numbers of distinct genotypes (Table 2). An alternative exact test procedure [20] was also performed (data not shown). Both tests failed to detect any significant deviation from the equilibrium. In addition, no significant deviation in heterozygosity when compared to other populations was observed [21-24].

Two standard parameters were used to describe the forensic usefulness of the systems analyzed in this study: power of exclusion (PE) and match probability (MP) (Table 3). The combined value of PE for all tested loci, based on expected genotype frequencies, was over 0.99 in stain cases, while combined PE in paternity cases was 0.98. As a more conservative parameter, but a potentially very informative estimator of forensic usefulness, the frequency of the most common phenotype and its corresponding MP value, were calculated (see Table 3).