Is there low maternal genetic variation in West Asian populations of leopard?
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ORIGINAL PAPER
Is there low maternal genetic variation in West Asian populations of leopard? Mohammad S. Farhadinia 1 & Mohammad Reza Ashrafzadeh 2 & Helen Senn 3 & Sohrab Ashrafi 4 & Hamid Farahmand 4 & Muhammad Ghazali 3 & Luke T. B. Hunter 5 & David W. Macdonald 6 Received: 9 March 2020 / Accepted: 20 May 2020 # The Author(s) 2020
Abstract Persian leopards Panthera pardus saxicolor have been extirpated from over 84% of their historic range and are now limited to rugged landscapes of West Asia and the Caucasus. Understanding and maintaining genetic diversity and population connectivity is important for preventing inbreeding and genetic drift, both of which can threaten population viability. All previous analyses of intraspecific genetic variation of West Asian leopards based on the NADH dehydrogenase subunit 5 gene have reported low mitogenomic diversity. In the current study, we sequenced 959 bp of the mtDNA cytochrome b gene to describe the spatial genetic structure of 22 wild Persian leopards across Iran, which hosts most of the subspecies extant range. The findings based on phylogenetic trees and median-joining network indicated that leopards from Iran formed a distinct subclade, i.e., P. p. saxicolor. The AMOVA analysis showed significant differentiation (88.55%) between the subclades of Persian leopards and other Asian leopards. The lowest levels of haplotype (0.247) and nucleotide (0.00078) diversity were estimated in Persian leopards from Iran. Mitochondrial genome sequencing revealed only two closely related haplotypes. There was no evidence for recent sudden demographic expansion scenario in Persian leopards. The low diversity in cytochrome b gene could potentially be brought about by selective pressure on mitochondria to adapt to oxidative stress and higher metabolic rates in cold environments. Keywords Cytochrome b . Haplotype diversity . Persian leopard . Hypoxia . Panthera pardus saxicolor
Introduction As a large-bodied, wide-ranging felid, the leopard Panthera pardus has evolved to persist across a diverse range of habitat types (Jacobson et al. 2016). Adapting to extreme heterogeneity across its vast global range has resulted in remarkable
morphological variation, encouraging taxonomists to describe up to 27 putative subspecies (Ellerman and Morrison-Scott 1966; Herrington 1986), recently revised to only 8 subspecies (Kitchener et al. 2017). Leopards also show higher genetic diversity than many other big cats such tigers P. tigris (Luo et al. 2004), jaguars P. onca (Wultsch et al. 2016) and snow
Communicated by: Jan M. Wójcik Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s13364-020-00510-1) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Mohammad S. Farhadinia [email protected] 1
2
Oxford Martin School and Department of Zoology, University of Oxford, 34 Broad Street, Oxford OX1 3BD, UK Department of Fisheries and Environmental Sciences, Faculty of Natural Resources and Earth Sciences, Shahrekord Univer
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