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Introduction Atrial fibrillation (AF) is nowadays considered to be one of the most important causes of heart failure, stroke, cognitive decline, vascular dementia, sudden death and overall cardiovascular morbidity. Recently were published a few articles suggesting a possible involvement of telocytes in the development of atrial fibrillation. The purpose of this article is to analyze the results obtained in the field systematically, and to see if there is enough data to support a possible involvement of telocytes in arrhythmogenesis. Materials and methods To this end, we performed a systematic review of the relevant scientific literature, indexed in PubMed, Web of Science, and Scopus. Results and discussions Our systematic review of the published data identified five articles containing original data, based on which the association between telocytes and atrial fibrillation was inferred in later studies. We analyzed the usefulness of the information contained in the original articles to support this association, showing a lack of definite proofs correlating telocytes with atrial fibrillation. Conclusions Even if a few articles implied a potential association between AF and telocytes, the current data is not enough to support it. Moreover, even an association between the morphology, characteristics, or density of the telocytes in the atrium/pulmonary veins and AF is potentially speculative, and more studies should be performed before implying it with a reasonable degree of certainty.

Aim A collaborative exercise with several institutes was organized by the Forensic DNA Service (FDNAS) and the Institute of the Legal Medicine, 2nd Faculty of Medicine, Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic, with the aim to test performance of different laboratories carrying out DNA analysis of relatively old bone samples. Methods Eighteen laboratories participating in the collaborative exercise were asked to perform DNA typing of two samples of bone powder. Two bone samples provided by the National Museum and the Institute of Archaelogy in Prague, Czech Republic, came from archeological excavations and were estimated to be approximately 150 and 400 years old. The methods of genetic characterization including autosomal, gonosomal, and mitochondrial markers was selected solely at the discretion of the participating laboratory. Results Although the participating laboratories used different extraction and amplification strategies, concordant results were obtained from the relatively intact 150 years old bone sample. Typing was more problematic with the analysis of the 400 years old bone sample due to poorer quality. Conclusion The laboratories performing identification DNA analysis of bone and teeth samples should regularly test their ability to correctly perform DNA-based identification on bone samples containing degraded DNA and potential inhibitors and demonstrate that risk of contamination is minimized.

The recovery of genetic information from highly degraded or minute amount of biological samples needs special approaches together with conventional STR multiplex assays. In this respect, the "mini-STR" technology is considered to be remarkable for its capacity to decrease the rate of failures and inconclusive results in forensic casework. By using miniSTRs, the PCR efficiency is significantly improved as shorter PCR amplicons are generated with STR primers located closer to the repeat regions. In this article we aimed to present several practical considerations regarding the miniSTR genotyping for challenging forensic samples. Looking for a robust protocol to re-investigate some of our cases with inconclusive or no typing results we studied the efficiency of a miniSTR approach. We report by comparison our results obtained with a commercial miniSTR multiplex assay on samples previously tested with two different 16 STR commercial kits. Our conclusion is definitely in favor of including in the routine protocol the miniSTR assay as it was able to improve the results, providing better or even complete DNA profiles for the difficult samples where the conventional STR kits failed.