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Molecular tracking and prevalence of the red colour morph restricted to a harvested leopard population in South Africa
The red leopard (Panthera pardus) colour morph is a colour variant that occurs only in South Africa, where it is confined to the Central Bushveld bioregion. Red leopards have been spreading over the past 40 years, which raises the speculation that the prevalence of this phenotype is related to low d...
Autores principales: | , , , , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
John Wiley and Sons Inc.
2022
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9234631/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35782007 http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/eva.13423 |
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author | Tensen, Laura Power, John Camacho, Gerrie Godinho, Raquel Jansen van Vuuren, Bettine Fischer, Klaus |
author_facet | Tensen, Laura Power, John Camacho, Gerrie Godinho, Raquel Jansen van Vuuren, Bettine Fischer, Klaus |
author_sort | Tensen, Laura |
collection | PubMed |
description | The red leopard (Panthera pardus) colour morph is a colour variant that occurs only in South Africa, where it is confined to the Central Bushveld bioregion. Red leopards have been spreading over the past 40 years, which raises the speculation that the prevalence of this phenotype is related to low dispersal of young individuals owing to high off‐take in the region. Intensive selective hunting tends to remove large resident male leopards from the breeding population, which gives young male leopards the chance to mate with resident female leopards that are more likely to be their relatives, eventually increasing the frequency of rare genetic variants. To investigate the genetic mechanisms underlying the red coat colour morph in leopards, and whether its prevalence in South Africa relates to an increase in genetic relatedness in the population, we sequenced exons of six coat colour‐associated genes and 20 microsatellite loci in twenty Wild‐type and four red leopards. The results were combined with demographic data available from our study sites. We found that red leopards own a haplotype in homozygosity identified by two SNPs and a 1 bp deletion that causes a frameshift in the tyrosinase‐related protein 1 (TYRP1), a gene known to be involved in the biosynthesis of melanin. Microsatellite analyses indicate clear signs of a population bottleneck and a relatedness of 0.11 among all pairwise relationships, eventually supporting our hypothesis that a rare colour morph in the wild has increased its local frequency due to low natal dispersal, while subject to high human‐induced mortality rate. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-9234631 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2022 |
publisher | John Wiley and Sons Inc. |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-92346312022-06-30 Molecular tracking and prevalence of the red colour morph restricted to a harvested leopard population in South Africa Tensen, Laura Power, John Camacho, Gerrie Godinho, Raquel Jansen van Vuuren, Bettine Fischer, Klaus Evol Appl Original Articles The red leopard (Panthera pardus) colour morph is a colour variant that occurs only in South Africa, where it is confined to the Central Bushveld bioregion. Red leopards have been spreading over the past 40 years, which raises the speculation that the prevalence of this phenotype is related to low dispersal of young individuals owing to high off‐take in the region. Intensive selective hunting tends to remove large resident male leopards from the breeding population, which gives young male leopards the chance to mate with resident female leopards that are more likely to be their relatives, eventually increasing the frequency of rare genetic variants. To investigate the genetic mechanisms underlying the red coat colour morph in leopards, and whether its prevalence in South Africa relates to an increase in genetic relatedness in the population, we sequenced exons of six coat colour‐associated genes and 20 microsatellite loci in twenty Wild‐type and four red leopards. The results were combined with demographic data available from our study sites. We found that red leopards own a haplotype in homozygosity identified by two SNPs and a 1 bp deletion that causes a frameshift in the tyrosinase‐related protein 1 (TYRP1), a gene known to be involved in the biosynthesis of melanin. Microsatellite analyses indicate clear signs of a population bottleneck and a relatedness of 0.11 among all pairwise relationships, eventually supporting our hypothesis that a rare colour morph in the wild has increased its local frequency due to low natal dispersal, while subject to high human‐induced mortality rate. John Wiley and Sons Inc. 2022-06-08 /pmc/articles/PMC9234631/ /pubmed/35782007 http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/eva.13423 Text en © 2022 The Authors. Evolutionary Applications published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This is an open access article under the terms of the http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. |
spellingShingle | Original Articles Tensen, Laura Power, John Camacho, Gerrie Godinho, Raquel Jansen van Vuuren, Bettine Fischer, Klaus Molecular tracking and prevalence of the red colour morph restricted to a harvested leopard population in South Africa |
title | Molecular tracking and prevalence of the red colour morph restricted to a harvested leopard population in South Africa |
title_full | Molecular tracking and prevalence of the red colour morph restricted to a harvested leopard population in South Africa |
title_fullStr | Molecular tracking and prevalence of the red colour morph restricted to a harvested leopard population in South Africa |
title_full_unstemmed | Molecular tracking and prevalence of the red colour morph restricted to a harvested leopard population in South Africa |
title_short | Molecular tracking and prevalence of the red colour morph restricted to a harvested leopard population in South Africa |
title_sort | molecular tracking and prevalence of the red colour morph restricted to a harvested leopard population in south africa |
topic | Original Articles |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9234631/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35782007 http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/eva.13423 |
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