Research overview: cheetah immune uniformity and the skin-graft experiments

One of the most striking early demonstrations of the cheetah's genetic depletion was that skin grafts exchanged between unrelated cheetahs were accepted rather than rejected, indicating near-identical major histocompatibility complex genotypes. This overview surveys these classic reciprocal-transplant experiments, their interpretation as evidence of extreme genome-wide homozygosity, and the broader implications for disease susceptibility in a population that cannot mount diverse immune responses. It discusses how the finding shaped the view of the cheetah as uniquely vulnerable, later concerns about disease outbreaks in captive and wild populations, and how modern genomics confirmed and refined the picture of depleted immune-gene diversity first revealed by transplantation.