Post #910

Snow leopard - Panthera uncia is a big cat, distributed from western Tian Shan and Pamir mountains to eastern Xinjiang, and northern Altai (Russia, Mongolia) mountains; in southern Qinghai-Tibetan mountains to Himalaya. Snow leopard taxonomy is still controversial. The northern (Altai), western (Tian Shan, trans-Himalaya) and central subspecies (core Himalaya) was globally accepted. However, in this study, Chinese scientists assembled de novo chromosome-level genome and mapped 53 individuals’ whole-genome resequencing data, and filtered high-quality ~ 1.48 mln SNPs, average genome coverage 21.9-fold. The results of SNPs based phylogenetic tree, PCA and ADMIXTURE revealed two major lineages: northern and southern (Fig 1B). Northern lineage included Altai, Tian Shan (west and east) and Pamir populations, whereas southern lineage included Qinghai-Tibetan and core Himalaya populations. Previously accepted two northern and western subspecies nested in northern lineage, and central subspecies nested in southern lineage. The Fst value between northern and western lineage was 0.126, a bit lower than most of other studies to distinguish two subspecies thresholds. Admixture analysis also supported two lineages, cv error was appointed to be lowest in K=2, interestingly authors re-confirmed recent admixture of snow leopards between Xinjiang and Tajikistan, which was observed in previous studies too. Two lineages of snow leopards can be also seen in their distribution, the Gobi desert between Mongolia and China, the Taklamakan desert between western and central Himalay play as a geographical barriers. This boundary is an important geographical barrier for food competition and survival of animals. In conclusion, this part of study indicated that snow leopards shall be considered as two subspecies, rather than three subspecies. https://t.me/EvolutionaryGenomics