Tensen Laura, Power John, Camacho Gerrie, Godinho Raquel, Jansen van Vuuren Bettine, Fischer Klaus
Institute for Integrated Natural Sciences, Zoology University of Koblenz-Landau Koblenz Germany.
Department of Zoology, Centre for Ecological Genomics and Wildlife Conservation University of Johannesburg Johannesburg South Africa.
Evol Appl. 2022 Jun 8;15(6):1028-1041. doi: 10.1111/eva.13423. eCollection 2022 Jun.
The red leopard () 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 (), 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.
黑化豹（）毛色变体是一种仅出现在南非的颜色变异类型，其分布局限于中部灌木veld生物区域。在过去40年里，黑化豹一直在扩散，这引发了一种推测，即这种表型的流行与该地区高捕杀率导致幼崽扩散率低有关。高强度的选择性捕猎往往会将大型成年雄性豹从繁殖种群中清除，这使得年轻雄性豹有机会与更可能是其亲属的成年雌性豹交配，最终增加了罕见基因变体的频率。为了研究豹黑化毛色变体背后的遗传机制，以及其在南非的流行是否与种群中遗传相关性的增加有关，我们对20只野生型豹和4只黑化豹的六个毛色相关基因的外显子和20个微卫星位点进行了测序。研究结果与我们研究地点现有的人口统计数据相结合。我们发现，黑化豹拥有一种纯合单倍型，由两个单核苷酸多态性（SNP）和一个1碱基缺失确定，该缺失导致酪氨酸酶相关蛋白1（）发生移码，已知该基因参与黑色素的生物合成。微卫星分析表明存在明显的种群瓶颈迹象，所有成对关系中的相关性为0.11，最终支持了我们的假设，即野生环境中一种罕见的毛色变体由于出生扩散率低而在当地频率增加，同时受到高人为诱导死亡率的影响。
