Bone Marrow Engraftment Monitoring Using Mixture Deconvolution Software Designed for Forensic Casework.

Following a bone marrow transplant, patients are monitored closely for evidence of graft rejection or recurrence of the original disease. Bone marrow transplantation creates a donor-recipient cellular chimerism in the patient, which can be quantitively measured through short tandem repeat (STR) analysis of peripheral whole blood to determine the percent chimerism of the sample. Increasing recipient chimerism is an indication of graft rejection or relapse. Software programs designed to analyze forensic mixture samples have the potential to be useful in analyzing post-transplant mixed chimeric samples. Post-transplant samples were analyzed using three mixture deconvolution software programs. The programs were fast, accurate and consistent in determining the mixing proportions of the samples and the three programs gave concordant results.