Computational approach to utilisation of mitochondrial DNA in the verification of complex pedigree errors

Mitochondrial DNA information can be used to verify pedigree concordance of both close and remote relatives along maternal lines. Different haplotypes in the same maternal line point out to an error in the pedigree. This has been used in several studies as the indication of the accuracy of the pedigree data. In all of these studies the collation of the haplotype data has been performed manually. With large pedigrees this is a tedious work prone to mistakes. We present the computational approach to this task based on the algorithm that systematically traces non-concordance among all sequenced individuals through maternal pedigree. Based on the number of found errors, we have introduced several numerical descriptors of pedigree quality. We demonstrate the functionality of our program with the analysis of a small example taken from a long and complex Lipizzan horse pedigree.