The application of DNA profiling to the identification of victims in the Gulf war (1990-1991)

This project was designed and developed in response to the need to improve the methodology employed in the DNA profiling of the Kuwaiti victims of the First Gulf War (1990-1991). The main challenges have involved developing the methodology in an attempt to increase the DNA recovery from the skeletal remains and also assess the preservation of DNA in the remains. In addition, work was undertaken to assess two commercial STR amplification kits, the Identifiler® and MiniFilerTM, to establish allele frequency databases for use in Kuwait and to assess the concordance of the two kits. In order to assess the methodology for DNA extraction and prediction of DNA preservation two sources of materials were used: simulated casework samples and actual casework samples. To obtain simulated casework samples, bones from sheep and teeth from human were buried at three different sites within Kuwait. These were sampled over a period of 60 weeks. In addition, samples from the femur and humerus of 25 individuals who were killed during the Gulf War, but had not yet been identified, were taken for analysis. These were exhumed from five gravesites, three in Iraq and two in Kuwait. Previous attempts to generate DNA profiles from the samples had failed. Different extractions protocols and purification methods were assessed including: a phenol:chloroform-based extraction; the GENECLEAN® Kit (Obiogene); QlAquick Gel Extraction kit (Qiagen); the QIAamp DNA Blood Maxi kit (Qiagen), using a protocol based on Davoren et al (2007); and a modified silica-based extraction using the DNeasy® Blood and Tissue Kit (Qiagen). PCR amplification of the extracts and the real-time quantification results showed that the modification of a silica-based method, using the Qiagen DNeasy® kit, was successful in removing inhibitors that were present in the extracts and obtained with all the other extraction methods. This allowed the successful profiling of 19 out of the 25 samples that had previously failed. In an attempt to further improve the DNA extraction efficiency, the effect of Nphenacylthiazolium bromide (PTB) was assessed. PTB has been reported previously to improve DNA extraction from ancient DNA samples (Paabo, 1989; Poinar et al., 1998) by releasing DNA that has become cross-linked with proteins. In this study, the effect of PTB, while statistically significant when used with samples from some sites, was minimal. The power of different methods to allow an effective system of triage (sorting of samples based on the likelihood of successful analysis) was examined. Three parameters were assessed: gross morphology, histology, and chemical status of the bones were compared with the amount and quality of DNA that was recovered from different samples. The simulated casework samples displayed only minor changes in gross morphology and histology over the period of the study, whereas the casework samples displayed varying degrees of change. The samples from Iraqi sites generally displayed good morphological and histological preservation. In contrast, the samples from the two sites within Kuwait displayed an almost complete lack of histological features and changes (pitting/cracks) to the surface. The morphological and histological preservation correlated closely with the success rate when extracting DNA from casework samples that were buried in Iraq and Kuwait. Nitrogen content in all samples was very similar and the results showed that it was not a useful indicator of preservation. The MiniFilertM (Applied Biosystems) is designed for the analysis of degraded DNA. Before applying this to casework, it is important to carry out a concordance study in order to ensure the results with the MiniFilerTM are comparable to the Identifiler® (Applied Biosystems) DNA profiles. The reference database with relatives' DNA profiles are all generated using Identifiler®. To assess the concordance, the MiniFilerTM profiles from 200 unrelated Kuwaiti samples were compared to Identifiler® profiles. Concordance was observed for 99.875% of the compared loci (1598 of 1600). The two discordant profiles displayed allelic dropout: one at the Dl 35317 locus due to non-amplification of allele 10 in the MiniFilerTM profile, and one at the D18S51 locus due to nonamplification of allele 18 in the Identifiler® profile. Finally, since the population of Kuwait is heterogeneous, with a strong tribal system, the possibility of subpopulation effect within the Kuwaiti population was examined. Allele frequencies for the 15 STR loci included in Identifiler® kit were ascertained in a sample population of 502 unrelated Kuwaiti individuals. The results were compared with 6 different populations. The Kuwaiti population was very similar to neighboring Iraqi and Saudi populations. These data are now used in casework undertaken in Kuwait, to calculate the statistical significance of matching DNA profiles (the results of the reference database work are included in Appendix 1 rather than in the main body of the thesis)

Ethical considerations in exploiting, culturing and killing fish towards animal rights in Islam

Human show cruelty to fish during exploiting, culturing, killing, experimentation and amusement. Presently, overexploitation of marine fishes is a serious problem worldwide. More than 50% of total fish production is now raised in aquafarms where many fish suffer from parasitic infections, diseases, and debilitating injuries in culture systems. Every year, millions of fish are caught in nets and on hooks. Many of them are tortured just for sports. Fishes are also regularly used for scientific experiments. Many of them are killed by unethical ways. Among all animals, human is the main culprits in causing harms to animals including fishes by damaging their ecosystems. To secure animal rights, modern bio-ethics started to be developed in the last century. The principle of modern bio-ethics is very similar to the principle of Islamic bio-ethics. Therefore, modern bio-ethics might be guided by Islamic bio-ethics, which was well established in the 7th century. According to Islam, God gave the human being responsibility to look after animals, to protect them, and not to abuse or threaten them. Human is not permitted to kill animals just for sports or amusements. God created the universe in a perfect balance and human should not disturb this. Therefore, human may exploit and culture food (fish and other organisms) and ornaments without destroying aquatic ecosystems. Islam prescribes a set of rules to treat animals with the utmost kindness and compassion. However, Islamic direction can be integrated with science to ensure minimum stress, pain and suffering when killing animals including fishes

Concordance Between the AmpFℓSTR®MiniFiler™ and AmpFℓSTR®Identifiler®PCR Amplification Kits in the Kuwaiti Population

The AmpFℓSTR® MiniFiler™ polymerase chain reaction amplification kit, developed and supplied by Applied Biosystems, complements the AmpFℓSTR® Identifiler® polymerase chain reaction amplification kit (Applied Biosystems, Warrington, U.K.) by improving the success rate when profiling DNA that is degraded or contains inhibitors. Before applying the MiniFiler™ kit to casework, the profiles from 200 unrelated Kuwaitis were compared to Identifiler® profiles. Concordance was observed for 99.875% (1598 of 1600) of the compared STR loci. The two discordant profiles displayed allelic dropout: one at the D13S317 locus due to nonamplification of allele 10 in the MiniFiler™ profile, and one at the D18S51 locus due to nonamplification of allele 18 in the Identifiler® profile

Weighted Constraint Feature Selection of Local Descriptor for Texture Image Classification

There are several statistical descriptors for feature extraction from texture images. Local binary pattern is one of the most popular descriptors for revealing the underlying structure of a texture. Recently several variants of local binary descriptors have been proposed. The completed local binary pattern is an efficient version that can provide discriminant features and consequently provide a high classification rate. It finely characterizes a texture by fusing three histograms of features. Fusing histograms is applied by jointing the histograms and it increases the feature number significantly; therefore, in this paper, a weighted constraint feature selection approach is proposed to select a very small number of features without any degradation in classification accuracy. It significantly enhances the classification rate by using a very low number of informative features. The proposed feature selection approach is a filter-based feature selection. It employed a weighted constraint score for each feature. After ranking the features, a threshold estimation method is proposed to select the most discriminant features. For a better comparison, a wide range of different datasets is used as a benchmark to assess the compared methods. Implementations on Outex, UIUC, CUReT, MeasTex, Brodatz, Virus, Coral Reef, and ORL face datasets indicate that the proposed method can provide high classification accuracy without any learning step just by selecting a few features of the descriptor

An Overview of the World Current and Future Assessment of Novel COVID-19 Trajectory, Impact, and Potential Preventive Strategies at Healthcare Settings

This study is an overview of the current and future trajectory, as well as the impact of the novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) in the world and selected countries including the state of Kuwait. The selected countries were divided into two groups: Group A (China, Switzerland, and Ireland) and Group B (USA, Brazil, and India) based on their outbreak containment of this virus. Then, the actual data for each country were fitted to a regression model utilizing the excel solver software to assess the current and future trajectory of novel COVID-19 and its impact. In addition, the data were fitted using the Susceptible–Infected–Recovered (SIR) Model. The Group A trajectory showed an “S” shape trend that suited a logistic function with r2 > 0.97, which is an indication of the outbreak control. The SIR models for the countries in this group showed that they passed the expected 99% end of pandemic dates. Group B, however, exhibited a continuous increase of the total COVID-19 new cases, that best suited an exponential growth model with r2 > 0.97, which meant that the outbreak is still uncontrolled. The SIR models for the countries in this group showed that they are still relatively far away from reaching the expected 97% end of pandemic dates. The maximum death percentage varied from 3.3% (India) to 7.2% with USA recording the highest death percentage, which is virtually equal to the maximum death percentage of the world (7.3%). The power of the exponential model determines the severity of the country’s trajectory that ranged from 11 to 19 with the USA and Brazil having the highest values. The maximum impact of this COVID-19 pandemic occurred during the uncontrolled stage (2), which mainly depended on the deceptive stage (1). Further, some novel potential containment strategies are discussed. Results from both models showed that the Group A countries contained the outbreak, whereas the Group B countries still have not reached this stage yet. Early measures and containment strategies are imperative in suppressing the spread of COVID-19

A novel fuzzy trust-based secure routing scheme in flying ad hoc networks

Today, many studies assess vulnerabilities, threats, and attacks in flying ad hoc networks (FANETs) to provide solutions for countermeasures. Protecting FANETs against attackers and coordinating connections are challenging. The purpose of this study is to increase and maintain communication security. In this paper, a fuzzy trust-based secure routing scheme (FTSR) is presented in FANETs. FTSR utilizes two trust assessment mechanisms, namely local trust and path trust. Local trust strategy is a distributed process for finding reliable neighboring nodes and isolating hostile nodes on the network. In this regard, only reliable nodes are allowed to contribute to the path discovery procedure. This lowers the risk of forming fake paths in FANETs. Path trust strategy is responsible for identifying hostile nodes that are not identified in the local trust process. This strategy shows a general view of the trust status of the desired path. To design this mechanism, the source node runs a fuzzy system to select the safest path between source and the destination. Finally, network simulator 2 (NS2) implements FTSR, and the results such as malicious detection rate, packet delivery ratio, packet loss, accuracy, and delay are obtained from the simulation process. These results indicate that FTSR presents better performance compared to TOPCM, MNRiRIP, and MNDA. However, FTSR takes more time to find paths compared to TOPCM