The aim of this study was to evaluate variations of mitochondrial DNA hypervariable I region Cstretch among 60 unrelated Indian Muslim population of Shrirangapatna town, Karnataka state, south India. The mtDNA hypervariable I region was amplified and sequenced by the Sanger sequencing method. It revealed a total of 8 different C- stretch haplotypes resulting from 8 variable sites. The most frequent haplotype occurred thirty seven times and it is also common in other populations. A statistical estimate for the studied population defined a genetic diversity of 0.569 and random match probability of 0.44. The power of discrimination was found to be 0.56 and the rest of the statistical parameters such as mean of pair-wise differences and nucleotide diversity were calculated as 1.104520 +/- 0.733189 and 0.073635 +/- 0.054209 respectively. These results imparted that the C-stretch in mtDNA HVS-I region could be a valuable genetic marker in forensic investigation of the Muslim population in south India, and the findings from the Fst genetic distance matrix, neighbor-joining tree and multidimensional scaling plot indicated that C-stretch could be applied to molecular evolution and population genetic studies as well.
