Comment on “DNA mixtures interpretation – A proof-of-concept multi-software comparison highlighting different probabilistic methods’ performances on challenging samples” by Alladio et al.

Alladio et al. [1] recently published findings comparing the performance of semi-continuous probabilistic genotyping (PG) systems LRmix Studio and Lab Retriever, with the fully-continuous systems STRmix™, EuroForMix, and DNA VIEW. While there has been some work in this area [[2], [3], [4]] the breadth of samples tested and software compared have been limited. Alladio et al. fills a gap in the PG research landscape, which is the independent (in terms of software developers) comparison of the performance of such systems. This is one of the recommended actions for the field of DNA analysis by the PCAST report [5,6], specifically:

“Under what circumstances - and why - does the method produce results (random inclusion probabilities) that differ substantially from those produced by other methods?”