Ancient DNA from the Asiatic wild dog (Cuon alpinus) from Europe

Taron, U.H., Paijmans, J.L.A., Barlow, A. ORCID: 0000-0002-5532-9458, Preick, M., Iyengar, A., Drăgușin, V., Vasile, Ș., Marciszak, A., Roblíčková, M. and Hofreiter, M., 2021. Ancient DNA from the Asiatic wild dog (Cuon alpinus) from Europe. Genes, 12 (2): 144.

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Abstract

The Asiatic wild dog (Cuon alpinus), restricted today largely to South and Southeast Asia, was widespread throughout Eurasia and even reached North America during the Pleistocene. Like many other species, it suffered from a huge range loss towards the end of the Pleistocene and went extinct in most of its former distribution. The fossil record of the dhole is scattered and the identification of fossils can be complicated by an overlap in size and a high morphological similarity between dholes and other canid species. We generated almost complete mitochondrial genomes for six putative dhole fossils from Europe. By using three lines of evidence, i.e., the number of reads mapping to various canid mitochondrial genomes, the evaluation and quantification of the mapping evenness along the reference genomes and phylogenetic analysis, we were able to identify two out of six samples as dhole, whereas four samples represent wolf fossils. This highlights the contribution genetic data can make when trying to identify the species affiliation of fossil specimens. The ancient dhole sequences are highly divergent when compared to modern dhole sequences, but the scarcity of dhole data for comparison impedes a more extensive analysis.

Item Type: Journal article
Publication Title: Genes
Creators: Taron, U.H., Paijmans, J.L.A., Barlow, A., Preick, M., Iyengar, A., Drăgușin, V., Vasile, Ș., Marciszak, A., Roblíčková, M. and Hofreiter, M.
Publisher: MDPI AG
Date: 22 January 2021
Volume: 12
Number: 2
Identifiers:
NumberType
10.3390/genes12020144DOI
1404453Other
Rights: Copyright: © 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
Divisions: Schools > School of Science and Technology
Record created by: Linda Sullivan
Date Added: 01 Feb 2021 11:25
Last Modified: 31 May 2021 15:07
URI: https://irep.ntu.ac.uk/id/eprint/42156

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