To follow up on what Francesco Martoni said above, there are dozens of ways to do "DNA fingerprinting" from rather crude restriction fragment length polymorphisms (more common in prokaryotes or the organelles of eukaryotes) to amplified fragment length polymorphisms, to "SNP on a chip" (single nucleotide polymorphisms detected on a silicon chip), to DNA sequencing of regions or whole chromosomes or whole genomes.

Mendel did not know about DNA, nor about sex chromosomes and the genomes of organelles (mitochondria, chloroplasts, etc) so there are a few regions of eukaryotic DNA that do not follow Mendel's dominant/recessive types of expression. Some of these things can be useful for "fingerprinting" specific lineages of DNA back in time, such as looking only at Y chromosome DNA to trace males (dad, granfather, great-grandfather...) or mitochondrial DNA to trace females (mom, grandmother, great-grandmother) in mammals.

The end result is that "DNA fingerprinting" is a very general term that can apply to many different methods which each can be used on many different regions of eukaryotic (or prokaryotic) genomic or organelle DNA to get different types of historical information on different levels of diversity of organisms (modern humans or families, ancient humans and ethnic groups of humans, subspecies of mammals, all primates, all mammals, vertebrates, etc...).

Hi there,

if you are looking for a 'molecular biology principle', as you already mentioned, this is the Mendelian inheritance. If you are trying to understand how does it work, that's a different thing. In simple words, different regions of the genome are mutating at different rates. Some of these are very conservative, therefore these are very similar even between different species. On the other hand, other regions are mutating at a faster rate. This means there are regions of the genome that are extremely variable, to the point that different individuals within the same species and same population will have different DNA sequences for these regions.

For these reasons, targeting these variable regions will allow you to associate a specific DNA sequence to a specific individual, similarly to the association individual/finger prints.

Hope this is helpful!

To follow up on what Francesco Martoni said above, there are dozens of ways to do "DNA fingerprinting" from rather crude restriction fragment length polymorphisms (more common in prokaryotes or the organelles of eukaryotes) to amplified fragment length polymorphisms, to "SNP on a chip" (single nucleotide polymorphisms detected on a silicon chip), to DNA sequencing of regions or whole chromosomes or whole genomes.

Mendel did not know about DNA, nor about sex chromosomes and the genomes of organelles (mitochondria, chloroplasts, etc) so there are a few regions of eukaryotic DNA that do not follow Mendel's dominant/recessive types of expression. Some of these things can be useful for "fingerprinting" specific lineages of DNA back in time, such as looking only at Y chromosome DNA to trace males (dad, granfather, great-grandfather...) or mitochondrial DNA to trace females (mom, grandmother, great-grandmother) in mammals.

The end result is that "DNA fingerprinting" is a very general term that can apply to many different methods which each can be used on many different regions of eukaryotic (or prokaryotic) genomic or organelle DNA to get different types of historical information on different levels of diversity of organisms (modern humans or families, ancient humans and ethnic groups of humans, subspecies of mammals, all primates, all mammals, vertebrates, etc...).

The best marker for DNA finger printing is hyper variant loci. Few hyper variant loci quickly reaches the probability of matching two randomly selected individuals with same genotype is non ...