Genomes of critically endangered saola are shaped by population structure and purging

Genís Garcia-Erill1, Shanlin Liu2, Minh Duc Le3

  • 1Department of Biology, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark; Bioinformatics Research Centre, Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark.

Cell
|May 6, 2025
PubMed

Related Concept Videos

Conservation of Small Populations02:04

Conservation of Small Populations

Small population sizes put a species at extreme risk of extinction due to a lack of variation, and a consequent decrease in adaptability. This weakens the chances of survival under pressures such as climate change, competition from other species, or new diseases. Large populations are more likely to survive pressures such as these, as such populations are more likely to harbor individuals that have genetic variants that are adaptive under new stresses. Small populations are much less...
13.1K
Conservation of Declining Populations02:07

Conservation of Declining Populations

Conservation of declining population focuses on ways of detecting, diagnosing, and halting a population decline. The approach uses methods to prevent populations from going extinct.
9.6K
Limits to Natural Selection01:38

Limits to Natural Selection

Organisms that are well-adapted to their environment are more likely to survive and reproduce. However, natural selection does not lead to perfectly adapted organisms. Several factors constrain natural selection.
31.2K
Habitat Fragmentation02:31

Habitat Fragmentation

Habitat fragmentation describes the division of a more extensive, continuous habitat into smaller, discontinuous areas. Human activities such as land conversion, as well as slower geological processes leading to changes in the physical environment, are the two leading causes of habitat fragmentation. The fragmentation process typically follows the same steps: perforation, dissection, fragmentation, shrinkage, and attrition.
17.4K
Multi-species Conserved Sequences02:51

Multi-species Conserved Sequences

Next-generation sequencing technologies have created large genomic databases of a variety of animals and plants. Ever since the human genome project was completed, scientists studied the genome of primates, mammals, and other phylogenetically distant living beings. Such large-scale  studies have provided new insights into the evolutionary relationship between organisms.
Although the genome of each species varies greatly from each other, a few sequences are highly conserved. Such conserved...
3.9K
Gene Evolution - Fast or Slow?02:05

Gene Evolution - Fast or Slow?

The genomes of eukaryotes are punctuated by long stretches of sequence which do not code for proteins or RNAs. Although some of these regions do contain crucial regulatory sequences, the vast majority of this DNA serves no known function. Typically, these regions of the genome are the ones in which the fastest change, in evolutionary terms, is observed, because there is typically little to no selection pressure acting on these regions to preserve their sequences.
In contrast, regions which code...
7.1K