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Short tandem repeats on the Y chromosome (Y-STRs), characterized by paternal inheritance, are valuable in forensic practice. Notably, the potential application of Y-STRs in pedigrees should be drawn upon, especially in China’s surname-concentrated natural villages. The study focused on 50 Y-STRs, including 13 rapidly mutating (RM) Y-STRs that largely constitute the current Y-STR commercial kits, and determined the differences in these Y-STRs between branches in a large pedigree and the discriminatory power of these haplotypes in different units for male relatives. As indicated in the results, 14 inconsistencies were observed at 9 Y-STRs between 10 father-son pairs. In addition, these 50 Y-STR haplotypes discriminated 10 out of 47 father-son pairs, 106 of 148 cousin pairs, 70 of 119 uncle-nephew pairs, 17 of 39 brother pairs, and 14 out of 33 grandfather-grandson pairs in a large pedigree. The RM Y-STR set is able to differentiate close male relatives in a large pedigree.

Nowadays, the abuse of illegal drugs has been an increasingly grim problem in the world. Excitation–emission matrix fluorescence combined with parallel factor analysis was used to make a quantitative analysis of the simulated amphetamine-type illegal drugs. Satisfactory results were achieved for simultaneous determination of methamphetamine (MAM) and 3, 4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA) in the presence of adulterants. The average recoveries were (99.8 ± 0.6)% and (101.6 ± 5.7)% for MAM and MDMA, respectively. Figures of merit including root-mean-square error of calibration and prediction, sensitivity and selectivity were investigated to evaluate the performance of the proposed method. The limits of detection were 0.054 and 0.002 1 μg/mL for MAM and MDMA, respectively.

Heavy alcohol drinking is a major public health problem, causing a large disease, social and economic burden in societies. Subjective response (SR) to alcohol is an intermediate characteristic of heavy drinking. A variety of candidate genes have been reported to be associated with SR to alcohol. In this study, we investigated nine single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) related to SR to alcohol in healthy individuals from five Chinese ethnic groups, the Han, Hui, Tibetan, Mongolian and Uygur populations, and a total of 584 bloodstain samples were collected. The nine SNPs included four SNPs in alcohol-metabolizing genes (ADH1B, ADH1C, ALDH2 and CYP2E1*5B) and five SNPs in genes of neurobiological pathways (GABRA2, OPRM1, CHRNA3, HYKK and SLC6A4). A SNaPshot analysis method was developed to type these SNPs simultaneously, and all samples were typed successfully. Statistical analyses of the allele frequencies indicated that the frequencies of all SNPs, except for ADH1C, showed varying degrees of difference in the five studied ethnic groups. Tibetans showed the highest frequencies of risk alleles for heavy drinking at most loci. The genetic polymorphic differences found in this study revealed the variation in genetic susceptibility to heavy drinking in the studied populations.