Genome-wide screening for highly discriminative SNPs for personal identification and their assessment in world populations

•We present a panel of 175 SNP markers for the application of personal identification.•We optimized and validated 175 SNPs using 729 Chinese individuals using Ion Torrent.•175 SNPs possess very high heterozygosity as well as low within- and among-continent differentiations.•The panel produced a high power of discrimination in both regional and worldwide populations, with the average match probabilities ranging from 4.77×10−71 to 1.06×10−64 across 54 world populations.•The panel outperformed other forensic panels in match probability.