Discovery of the grave and identification of the remains of Matteo Maria Boiardo in Saint Mary's church, Scandiano (Reggio Emilia)

According to the documentary information and to the prospectings performed by means of the georadar, beneath the floor of the Church of Santa Maria of Scandiano (RE), it has been possible to locate the sepulchral crypts where the poet Matteo Maria Boiardo and other members of his family, such as his father Giovanni, his grandfather Feltrino and maybe his wife Taddea Gonzaga and one of his sons, Camillo, must have been buried. The exploration of these sepulchral crypts has led to the recovery of the skeletal remains belonging altogether to at least 20 persons (adults and children). Among them, 3 have been discovered into a sepulchral room and the rest into an adjacent tomb. Among the first ones, a person, with the same sex, age of death, sturdiness, height and physical characteristics of the poet Boiardo, has been identified. As confirmation of this probable identity, the genetic profile of this man, got from the nuclear dna sample taken from his body, has come out to be compatible with a possible father/child relationship, this result has been compared to the one gotten from the find found into the adjacent room where the poet's father and grandfather had to be buried. The body of a second person, of female sex and well on in years, with a genetic profile different from the previous ones, could be identified with Boiardo's wife. For what regards the body of the third man, besides it is not possible to exclude that it belongs to Camillo, the poet's son dead when he was very young, it has not been possible yet, to get enough proofs able to confirm this theory

The Epigenetic Evolution of Glioma Is Determined by the IDH1 Mutation Status and Treatment Regimen

Tumor adaptation or selection is thought to underlie therapy resistance in glioma. To investigate longitudinal epigenetic evolution of gliomas in response to therapeutic pressure, we performed an epigenomic analysis of 132 matched initial and recurrent tumors from patients with IDH-wildtype (IDHwt) and IDH-mutant (IDHmut) glioma. IDHwt gliomas showed a stable epigenome over time with relatively low levels of global methylation. The epigenome of IDHmut gliomas showed initial high levels of genome-wide DNA methylation that was progressively reduced to levels similar to those of IDHwt tumors. Integration of epigenomics, gene expression, and functional genomics identified HOXD13 as a master regulator of IDHmut astrocytoma evolution. Furthermore, relapse of IDHmut tumors was accompanied by histologic progression that was associated with survival, as validated in an independent cohort. Finally, the initial cell composition of the tumor microenvironment varied between IDHwt and IDHmut tumors and changed differentially following treatment, suggesting increased neoangiogenesis and T-cell infiltration upon treatment of IDHmut gliomas. This study provides one of the largest cohorts of paired longitudinal glioma samples with epigenomic, transcriptomic, and genomic profiling and suggests that treatment of IDHmut glioma is associated with epigenomic evolution toward an IDHwt-like phenotype.</p

Knowing Is Better than Wondering: The Cataloging of Natural Heritage between Museum Studies and Crime

This paper aims to analyze the role of natural heritage cataloging when criminal events challenge natural history museums. This study investigates the rhino horn thefts in Italian natural history museums from 2011 to 2015 to provide a comprehensive framework for these robberies while highlighting the weaknesses and strengths to prevent thefts and safeguard both rhino horns and natural history collections from future targeting

Alla scoperta dei misteri relativi alla conservazione del DNA estratto. Stato dell'arte e prospettive future

Prendendo spunto da un caso giudiziario italiano, sono stati indagati i misteri della conservazione del DNA estratto a diverse temperature, in diverse condizioni ambientali e a diverse tempistiche

Discovering the Mysteries About Degradation of Extracted DNA From Trace Evidence When Stored in Different Conditions: State-of-the-Art and Future Perspectives

Learning Objective: After attending this presentation, attendees will understand the consequences that inappropriate or inaccurate sample preservation can have on judicial caseworks and will gain knowledge on the best isolation and preservation strategies for DNA extracts for forensic genetics. Impact Statement: This presentation will impact the forensic science community by presenting experimental studies on DNA degradation of extracts preserved in non-ideal conditions and by providing guidelines on the best approaches to conserve them without losing any genetic information. The storage of DNA extracts is a debated topic in the forensic arena; despite the existing guidelines on the preservation of biological evidence, there are no clear agreements on the preservation of the extracts originated from the evidence in terms of duration nor temperature. According to NIST guidelines, extracted DNA to be preserved for the long term should be kept frozen.1,2 However, it is not infrequent to encounter situations in which extracts are kept at fridge or room temperature, with unknown implications for its degradation and, consequently, for the final analytical results. In order to evaluate DNA survival and degradation rates, different samples, including blood stains, buccal swabs and blood/saliva mixtures in increasing ratios, were extracted with several methods commonly used in forensic genetics and stored at different temperatures (+20°C, +4°C, and -20°C) for up to 150 days. Aliquots were quantified with qPCR to obtain a quantitative and qualitative assessment at time “0,” then every four days for the first 16 days and every 30 days after one month (from 30 to 150 days). In addition to qPCR, samples were amplified with commercial kits to evaluate their degree of efficiency and typing, on at least two instruments (Applied Biosystems® SeqStudioTM Genetic Analyzer and 3500 Genetic Analyzer) for performance comparisons. The NGS VISAGE panel for phenotype, as well as a new in-house-developed ancestry and phenotype panel, will be additionally applied to selected samples to evaluate the reliability of the NGS data on these samples. Preliminary results indicated that the frozen samples as well as room temperature vacuum-dried samples maintain a complete genetic profile useful for identification purposes and for NGS analyses; the complete results presented at the conference will clarify to what extent mixture samples can be informative on the identity of both contributors to the trace and for how long preservation at different temperatures can provide useful information, and will propose “best practices” that should be applied by forensic genetics laboratories and police forces in order to maximize the preservation of the genetic information in DNA extracts

A forensic image processing environment for investigation of surveillance video

We present an image processing software suite, based on the Matlab environment, specifically designed to be used as a forensic tool by law enforcement laboratories in the analysis of crime scene videos and images. Our aim is to overcome some drawbacks which normally appear when using standard image processing tools for this application, i.e. mainly the lack of full control and documentation on the operations which have been performed on the images, and the absence of new, more sophisticated algorithms which can provide improved performances and \u2018\u2018make the difference\u2019\u2019 in critical cases

Il ritrovamento della tomba e la identificazione dei resti di Matteo Maria Boiardo nella chiesa di Santa Maria di Scandiano (Reggio Emilia)

According to the documentary information and to the prospectings performed by means of the georadar, beneath the floor of the Church of Santa Maria of Scandiano (RE), it has been possible to locate the sepulchral crypts where the poet Matteo Maria Boiardo and other members of his family, such as his father Giovanni, his grandfather Feltrino and maybe his wife Taddea Gonzaga and one of his sons, Camillo, must have been buried. The exploration of these sepulchral crypts has led to the recovery of the skeletal remains belonging altogether to at least 20 persons (adults and children). Among them, 3 have been discovered into a sepulchral room and the rest into an adjacent tomb. Among the first ones, a person, with the same sex, age of death, sturdiness, height and physical characteristics of the poet Boiardo, has been identified. As confirmation of this probable identity, the genetic profile of this man, got from the nuclear dna sample taken from his body, has come out to be compatible with a possible father/child relationship, this result has been compared to the one gotten from the find found into the adjacent room where the poet’s father and grandfather had to be buried. The body of a second person, of female sex and well on in years, with a genetic profile different from the previous ones, could be identified with Boiardo’s wife. For what regards the body of the third man, besides it is not possible to exclude that it belongs to Camillo, the poet’s son dead when he was very young, it has not been possible yet, to get enough proofs able to confirm this theor

Fingerprint Change: Not Visible, But Tangible

Handâfoot syndrome, a chemotherapy-induced cutaneous toxicity, can cause an alteration in fingerprints causing a setback for cancer patients due to the occurrence of false rejections. A colon cancer patient was fingerprinted after not having been able to use fingerprint recognition devices after 6 months of adjuvant chemotherapy. The fingerprint images were digitally processed to improve fingerprint definition without altering the papillary design. No evidence of skin toxicity was present. Two months later, the situation returned to normal. The fingerprint evaluation conducted on 15 identification points highlighted the quantitative and qualitative fingerprint alteration details detected after the end of chemotherapy and 2 months later. Fingerprint alteration during chemotherapy has been reported, but to our knowledge, this particular case is the first ever reported without evident clinical signs. Alternative fingerprint identification methods as well as improved biometric identification systems are needed in case of unexpected situations

RGBM: regularized gradient boosting machines for identification of the transcriptional regulators of discrete glioma subtypes

We propose a generic framework for gene regulatory network (GRN) inference approached as a feature selection problem. GRNs obtained using Machine Learning techniques are often dense, whereas real GRNs are rather sparse. We use a Tikonov regularization inspired optimal L-curve criterion that utilizes the edge weight distribution for a given target gene to determine the optimal set of TFs associated with it. Our proposed framework allows to incorporate a mechanistic active biding network based on cis-regulatory motif analysis. We evaluate our regularization framework in conjunction with two non-linear ML techniques, namely gradient boosting machines (GBM) and random-forests (GENIE), resulting in a regularized feature selection based method specifically called RGBM and RGENIE respectively. RGBM has been used to identify the main transcription factors that are causally involved as master regulators of the gene expression signature activated in the FGFR3-TACC3-positive glioblastoma. Here, we illustrate that RGBM identifies the main regulators of the molecular subtypes of brain tumors. Our analysis reveals the identity and corresponding biological activities of the master regulators characterizing the difference between G-CIMP-high and G-CIMP-low subtypes and between PA-like and LGm6-GBM, thus providing a clue to the yet undetermined nature of the transcriptional events among these subtypes

TCGAbiolinks: an R/Bioconductor package for integrative analysis of TCGA data.

The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) research network has made public a large collection of clinical and molecular phenotypes of more than 10 000 tumor patients across 33 different tumor types. Using this cohort, TCGA has published over 20 marker papers detailing the genomic and epigenomic alterations associated with these tumor types. Although many important discoveries have been made by TCGA's research network, opportunities still exist to implement novel methods, thereby elucidating new biological pathways and diagnostic markers. However, mining the TCGA data presents several bioinformatics challenges, such as data retrieval and integration with clinical data and other molecular data types (e.g. RNA and DNA methylation). We developed an R/Bioconductor package called TCGAbiolinks to address these challenges and offer bioinformatics solutions by using a guided workflow to allow users to query, download and perform integrative analyses of TCGA data. We combined methods from computer science and statistics into the pipeline and incorporated methodologies developed in previous TCGA marker studies and in our own group. Using four different TCGA tumor types (Kidney, Brain, Breast and Colon) as examples, we provide case studies to illustrate examples of reproducibility, integrative analysis and utilization of different Bioconductor packages to advance and accelerate novel discoveries.SCOPUS: ar.jinfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishe