Publications by authors named "P De Knijff"

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  • Uveal melanoma (UM) primarily affects individuals with fair skin and light eyes, and researchers aimed to see if specific genetic variations (SNPs) related to eye color could predict patient outcomes.
  • The study involved analyzing DNA from 392 UM patients to link their eye color genotypes with various tumor characteristics and survival rates.
  • Results indicated that patients with the blue eye genotype (G/G of rs12913832) had worse survival rates and were more likely to have high-risk tumor features, suggesting a genetic factor in UM prognosis.
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  • The study investigates if mesenchymal stromal cells (MSCs) can transfer mitochondria to chondrocytes, which may help in treating articular cartilage defects.
  • Researchers used various techniques to visualize and measure mitochondrial transfer between these cell types, finding that this transfer happens within the first 16 hours through different methods.
  • After 28 days, chondrocytes receiving MSC mitochondria showed increased DNA and proteoglycan levels, indicating a positive effect on cartilage repair, but the transferred mitochondria could not be detected after a year.
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  • * This study analyzed mutation rates in 9379 pairs of men across 30 RM Y-STRs and found significant differences in mutation rates compared to standard Y-STRs, revealing higher differentiation rates among more distantly related individuals.
  • * The results indicate that RM Y-STRs can accurately predict the degree of patrilineal relatedness, with potential to greatly enhance forensic Y-chromosome analysis compared to traditional methods.
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Nowadays, the use of Y-chromosome polymorphisms forms an essential part of many forensic DNA investigations. However, this was not always the case. Only since 1992 have we seen that some forensic scientists started to have an interest in this chromosome.

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Ecological research is often hampered by the inability to quantify animal diets. Diet composition can be tracked through DNA metabarcoding of fecal samples, but whether (complex) diets can be quantitatively determined with metabarcoding is still debated and needs validation using free-living animals. This study validates that DNA metabarcoding of feces can retrieve actual ingested taxa, and most importantly, that read numbers retrieved from sequencing can also be used to quantify the relative biomass of dietary taxa.

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