PHYLOGENETIC AND POPULATION GENOMIC ANALYSES OF THREE HISTORICAL AND ANCIENT LEOPARD (PANTHERA PARDUS) GENOMES FROM ANATOLIA

Date

2026-9-03

Author

Yıldız, Nisan

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Leopards, once widely distributed across Eurasia and Africa, are now either extinct or in decline in most of their historical range, with several endangered populations including the Persian Leopard P. p. tulliana. Despite their important ecological role and their influence on human cultures, Western Asian leopards are scarcely studied, with very few studies on population dynamics, genomics, and changing demographies. Such studies could help inform decisions about conservation efforts and assess the vulnerability of extant populations. To that end, we sequenced 35 putative big cat remains collected across Anatolia to investigate historical patterns from the Paleolithic to today, and generated genomic data from two ancient and one historic leopard individuals with sufficient coverage for downstream analyses (0.001-0.1x), ranging from the Bronze Age to the 1950s CE. Together with published historic and modern genomes across the species’ distribution, we reconstructed the phylogenetic relationships of the Anatolian leopard samples using mitochondrial genomes and both Bayesian and maximum-likelihood-based inference methods. We further constructed a genome-wide de novo SNP panel using 25 published Panthera pardus genomes containing 1.8 million SNPs to analyze the genome-wide trends of variation and relationships among extinct and extant populations of leopards and Anatolian leopards.

Subject Keywords

leopard, anatolian leopard, ancient dna, population genomics

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/120703

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Graduate School of Informatics, Thesis