Presentation for the 2017 UNT Open Access Symposium. This presentation provides an overview of data types and repositories for accessing data from the National Library of Medicine.

This article shows that rates of stutter can vary substantially depending on the flanking haplotype, and while there are cases where the LUS is a better predictor of stutter than the PAL, examples to the contrary are apparent in commonly assayed forensic markers. Further, flanking variation that is 7 bp from the repeat region can impact rates of stutter. These findings suggest that non-proximal effects, such as DNA secondary structure, may be impacting the rates of stutter in common forensic short tandem repeat markers.

This article is part of a series of Editorials published biannually that highlights a number of recently published articles that describe crucial findings.