🧬 The Felid Wiki — 3,000 research summaries

Cats are famously indifferent to sweetness, and genetics revealed why: they carry a pseudogenized sweet-taste receptor gene that no longer produces a functional receptor. This overview surveys the dis…

The major histocompatibility complex encodes immune-recognition molecules whose diversity is crucial for resisting pathogens, and its depletion is a key concern in inbred cat populations. This overvie…

Before genome sequencing became routine, microsatellites, short tandem repeats scattered through the genome, were the workhorse markers of felid population and forensic genetics. This overview surveys…

Mitochondrial DNA, with its maternal inheritance, high copy number, and relatively fast evolution, was central to the first molecular phylogenies and phylogeographic studies of cats. This overview sur…

Estimating when cat lineages diverged requires calibrating molecular substitution rates against the fossil record, a process fraught with uncertainty when fossils are sparse. This overview surveys how…

Natural history museum collections preserve specimens spanning centuries, providing a genetic archive of felid populations as they existed before recent declines. This overview surveys how museum geno…

The rate at which new mutations arise sets the pace of evolution and the recovery of diversity in small populations, yet it has been difficult to measure directly in cats. This overview surveys effort…

Because most wild cats are elusive and difficult to capture, conservation geneticists increasingly rely on noninvasive samples such as scat, hair, and shed cells to obtain DNA without handling the ani…

While genetic rescue can revive inbred populations, mixing divergent populations carries a theoretical risk of outbreeding depression, where hybrids are less fit due to disrupted local adaptation or g…

Zoos and breeding programs maintain studbooks to manage the genetics of captive cat populations, aiming to retain diversity and avoid inbreeding across generations. This overview surveys how pedigree…

Reconstructing the felid tree has driven the adoption of increasingly sophisticated analytical methods, from single-gene trees to genome-wide coalescent and network approaches. This overview surveys h…

This overview synthesizes the deep-time evolution of cats, from the Oligocene Proailurus and Miocene Pseudaelurus stem felids through the divergence of the conical-toothed Felinae and the sabertoothed…

Habitat loss and fragmentation increasingly isolate cat populations into small patches separated by inhospitable terrain, reducing effective population size and gene flow. This overview surveys how co…

Since the first lightly sequenced domestic cat genome, feline genomics has advanced to highly contiguous, chromosome-level assemblies for the domestic cat and an expanding set of wild species. This ov…

Whole-genome sequencing reveals long stretches where an individual inherited identical segments from both parents, called runs of homozygosity, which accumulate with inbreeding and small population si…

The deep origins of the cat family trace to small civet-like carnivores of the Oligocene and Miocene, notably Proailurus and the later Pseudaelurus, from which both the modern cats and the sabertooths…

The bay cat lineage comprises three Asian cats: the Asian golden cat, the bay cat of Borneo, and the marbled cat. This overview surveys the genetic evidence establishing this lineage as one of the eig…

The black-footed cat, one of the smallest wild cats, is a southern African member of the Felis lineage notable for its fierce hunting and, in captivity, for inherited kidney disease. This overview sur…

Modern cats are divided into eight monophyletic lineages: the Panthera lineage (lions, tigers, leopards, jaguars, snow leopards, clouded leopards), the bay cat lineage, the caracal lineage, the ocelot…

Cats span a remarkable size range, from the kilogram-scale rusty-spotted and black-footed cats to tigers weighing hundreds of kilograms, and body size has evolved repeatedly in different directions. T…

Advances in sequencing, noninvasive sampling, and analysis are transforming how genetics informs cat conservation. This overview surveys emerging directions, including reference-quality genomes for ev…

Cats are obligate carnivores, physiologically dependent on a meat diet, and comparative genomics has uncovered the molecular underpinnings of this specialization. This overview surveys findings that f…

The modern cats diversified into roughly forty species within the last eleven million years, a relatively rapid radiation that left a tangled phylogeny marked by short internal branches. This overview…

Genetic tools are increasingly used to combat the illegal trade in cats and their parts, from tiger bones and skins to confiscated live animals. This overview surveys how forensic genetics assigns sei…

This landmark study reconstructed the evolutionary tree of all 37 living cat species using mitochondrial and nuclear DNA sequences combined with molecular dating calibrated by the fossil record. The a…

Warren E. Johnson, Eduardo Eizirik, Jill Pecon-Slattery, William J. Murphy, Agostinho Antunes, Emma Teeling, Stephen J. O'Brien · Science · 2006