Jose Pestano

• PhD
• Director of forensic genetics laboratory at University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria

This article reports on the first genetic assessment of the contemporary Mauritian population. Small island nodes such as Mauritius played a critical role in historic globalization processes and revealing high-resolution details of labour sourcing is crucial in order to better understand early-modern diaspora events. Mauritius is a particularly int...

Many studies presenting genetic analysis of dog breeds have been conducted without the inclusion of island dog breeds, although isolation can be one of the main factors in their origin. Here we report the genetic analysis at the nuclear and mitochondrial DNA levels of five Canary Island dog breeds (Canarian Warren Hound, Canary Island Mastiff, Gara...

Habitat destruction has been identified as one of the main threats to biodiversity. Among all factors causing habitat disturbance, wildfire is recognized as one of the most important ecological forces that influences not only the physical environment, but also the structure and composition of floral and faunal communities. These processes are often...

DNA quantification is a prerequisite for both low copy number (LCN) forensic analysis and ancient DNA (aDNA) studies. Moreover, if nuclear quantification is focused on the amelogenin locus, it also allows sex determination. Some of the problems of these techniques are allelic drop-out phenomenon in amelogenin locus and mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) qua...

Hairs are common biological samples in crime scene investigation. However, most of this evidence is comprised of hair fragments without the root. As the major part of DNA is located in the root, hair shafts are usually problematic samples in forensic analysis. For these reasons, hair DNA typing is directed at mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA), which is pre...

The analysis of STRs located on the X chromosome has been one of the strategies used to address complex kinship cases. Its usefulness is, however, limited by the low availability of population haplotype frequency data and lack of knowledge on the probability of mutations. Due to the large amount of data required to obtain reliable estimates, it is...

The laurel pigeon (Columba junoniae) is one of the two endemic species of columbids that inhabit the Canary Islands. Destruction of its unique laurel forest (laurisilva) habitat and predation by feral cats and rats led to the bird’s extinction on Gran Canaria. However, thanks to a captive breeding program, it has been successfully reintroduced to a...

Kudoid myxozoans have been reported causing serious chronic problems in marine fisheries, by reducing the market value of infected fish through pathological damage to the host musculature. We report here the overall prevalence of a Kudoa species in 84/277 (30.3%) fishes from 20 different species of high commercial value captured between October 201...

Kudoid Myxozoans and Microsporidia have been reported causing serious problems in fisheries with significant economic losses, not only by mortality, by causing deformities and white tumor-like lesions in muscle and peritoneum, which reduces its market value. In Canary islands, there is no knowledge about the epidemiology of fish parasites, if they...

The pathogenesis of life-threatening influenza A virus (IAV) disease remains elusive, as infection is benign in most individuals. We studied two relatives who died from influenza. We Sanger sequenced GATA2 and evaluated the mutation by gene transfer, measured serum cytokine levels, and analyzed circulating T- and B-cells. Both patients (father and...

Women all over the world are exposed to an unavoidable contamination by organochlorine pesticides and other chemical pollutants. Many of them are considered as xenoestrogens and have been associated with the development and progression of breast cancer. We have demonstrated that the most prevalent pesticide mixtures found in healthy women and in wo...

Organochlorine pesticides (OCs) have been associated with breast cancer development and progression, but the mechanisms underlying this phenomenon are not well known. In this work, we evaluated the effects exerted on normal human mammary epithelial cells (HMEC) by the OC mixtures most frequently detected in healthy women (H-mixture) and in women di...

Canis lupus familiaris mitochondrial DNA analysis has increased in recent years, not only for the purpose of deciphering dog domestication but also for forensic genetic studies or breed characterization. The resultant accumulation of data has increased the need for a normalized and phylogenetic-based nomenclature like those provided for human mater...

The present-day population structure of La Gomera is outstanding in its high aboriginal heritage, the greatest in the Canary Islands. This was earlier confirmed by both mitochondrial DNA and autosomal analyses, although genetic drift due to the fifteenth century European colonization could not be excluded as the main factor responsible. The present...

Population divergence and speciation are often explained by geographical isolation, but may also be possible under high gene flow due to strong ecology-related differences in selection pressures. This study combines coalescent analyses of genetic data (11 microsatellite loci and 1 Kbp of mtDNA) and ecological modelling to examine the relative contr...

Background Complete mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) genome analyses have greatly improved the phylogeny and phylogeography of human mtDNA. Human mitochondrial DNA haplogroup U6 has been considered as a molecular signal of a Paleolithic return to North Africa of modern humans from southwestern Asia. Results Using 230 complete sequences we have refined...

A correct sex assignment of a given bone or bone fragment is of paramount importance for the archaeologist, anthropologist and in forensic medicine. Discriminant functions, combining several anthropometric measurements obtained from individuals with known sex are useful tools for this purpose, but it is essential to know exactly the sex from which...

North Africa is considered a distinct geographic and ethnic entity within Africa. Although modern humans originated in this Continent, studies of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) and Y-chromosome genealogical markers provide evidence that the North African gene pool has been shaped by the back-migration of several Eurasian lineages in Paleolithic and Neol...

References of the populations studied in Table S4. (XLS)

Pairwise linearized FST for mtDNA (above diagonal) and Y-chromosome (below diagonal) haplogroups. (XLS)

MtDNA and Y-chromosome geographic haplogroup assignation. (XLS)

HVS-1 sequences, SNPs and RFLPs analysis results for the North-west Algerian population (N = 240). (XLS)

Distribution of H subhaplogroup frequencies (%) in the studied populations. (XLS)

mtDNA Haplogroup frequencies (%) in the studied populations. (XLS)

References of the populations studied in Table S2. (XLS)

Y-chromosome haplogroup frequencies (%) in the studied populations. (XLS)

References of the populations studied in Table S6. (XLS)

In this GHEP-ISFG exercise, participating labs were invited to evaluate a forensic case in which the mtDNA haplotype from a hair shaft in the victim’s hand matched the suspect’s haplotype. 31 forensic labs participated in the exercise. Although all except one used the EMPOP database to estimate the haplotype frequencies different final likelihood r...

During the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), the Canary Islands suffered one of the highest levels of repression by the insurgent side, even though there were no battles in the islands. More than 50 people were killed in the island of La Palma between July 1936 and June 1937. The Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory in La Palma, made up o...

We report a series of 14 patients from 11 kindreds with recessive partial (RP)-interferon (IFN)-γR1 deficiency. The I87T mutation was found in nine homozygous patients from Chile, Portugal and Poland, and the V63G mutation was found in five homozygous patients from the Canary Islands. Founder effects accounted for the recurrence of both mutations....

The Gallotia bravoana lizard, is an endangered species endemic to the Canary Island, entirely restricted to a very small area (~1Ha) in La Gomera. Here we report the isolation and characterization of fifteen microsatellite loci following an enrichment protocol. Although five loci were monomorphic, an average of 2.1 alleles per locus and an average...

El presente proyecto se centra en aplicar técnicas de biología molecular, demográficas y de biología re-productiva en cuatro endemismos canarios amenazados que se encuentran total o parcialmente localizados en los parques nacionales de Canarias: Silene nocteolens Webb & Berthel. (Parque Nacional del Teide, Tenerife); Ilex perado ssp. lopezlilloi (G...

A voluntary collaborative exercise aiming at the mitochondrial analysis of canine biological samples was carried out in 2006-2008 by the Non-Human Forensic Genetics Commission of the Spanish and Portuguese Working Group (GEP) of the International Society for Forensic Genetics (ISFG). The participating laboratories were asked to sequence two dog sam...

The indigenous Canary Islands population suffered a strong cultural and genetic impact when they were colonized by Europeans in the fifteenth century. The molecular analysis of the ABO blood group gene on aboriginal and seventeenth to eighteenth century remains confirms the demographic history of the islands depicted by previous archaeological, ant...

The widespread common chaffinch (Fringilla coelebs) inhabits five of the seven Canary Islands. Sequences of the mitochondrial cytochrome b gene (1002bp) revealed new insights into the systematics and phylogeography of this taxon. Additionally, a set of microsatellite loci were analyzed to examine the structure of these populations. Our results sugg...

The taxonomic classification of the common chaffinch (Fringilla coelebs) that inhabits the Canary Islands has been under debate for decades, mainly due to the absence of nuclear DNA analyses. In this study we describe the isolation and characterization of ten microsatellite loci (AAAG, AAAT and GT) from a La Palma specimen using an enrichment proto...

The blue chaffinch, Fringilla teydea, is an endemic species of the Canary Islands. This species is formed by two subspecies: The Teneriffean blue chaffinch (F. t. teydea), and the endangered Gran Canarian blue chaffinch, (F. t. polatzeki). Here we report the isolation and characterization of nine tetranucleotide microsatellites (AAAG and AAAT) from...

Organochlorine pesticides (OCs) have been associated with breast cancer development and progression. However, the deleterious mechanisms exerted by these contaminants are yet unclear and need to be further elucidated. In the present study, we investigated the effects of a number of OCs (previously detected in human serum from a Spanish population),...

Teeth from 38 aboriginal remains of La Palma (Canary Islands) were analyzed for external and endogenous mitochondrial DNA control region sequences and for diagnostic coding positions. Informative sequences were obtained from 30 individuals (78.9%). The majority of lineages (93%) were from West Eurasian origin, being the rest (7%) from sub-Saharan A...

The genus Euchloe Hübner, 1819, comprises a set of about 25 Palaearctic and Nearctic species grouped into two proposed subgenera (Euchloe HBN and Elphinstonia Klots groups; Back et al., 2006). The Euchloe subgenera groups aproximately 17 species widely distributed in North Africa, the Iberian peninsula and the Canary Islands. The species Euchloe be...

A collaborative work was carried out by the Spanish and Portuguese ISFG Working Group with a PCR multiplex for X chromosome STRs. Markers were selected among those described as polymorphic in humans and that have been used by some laboratories in forensics. Primers and various technical methods were investigated with the aim of optimizing a multipl...

The scincid lizard Chalcides sexlineatus is endemic to the island of Gran Canaria, within which it shows a pronounced phylogeographical pattern. Understanding the maintenance of this pattern requires knowledge of nuclear DNA structuring. Eleven polymorphic tetranucleotide microsatellite loci were isolated from a library constructed from genomic DNA...

We report the results of the seventh edition of the GEP-ISFG mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) collaborative exercise. The samples submitted to the participant laboratories were blood stains from a maternity case and simulated forensic samples, including a case of mixture. The success rate for the blood stains was moderate ( approximately 77%); even though...