🧬 The Felid Wiki — 3,000 research summaries

Building on earlier evidence of cheetah monomorphism, this study used hypervariable minisatellite and other molecular markers to estimate when the cheetah's genetic diversity collapsed. The analysis p…

Marilyn Menotti-Raymond, Stephen J. O'Brien · Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · 1993

This foundational paper reported that the cheetah carries extraordinarily low genetic variation across allozyme and other molecular markers, far below that of typical outbred mammals. The authors docu…

Stephen J. O'Brien, David E. Wildt, David Goldman, Carl R. Merril, Mitchell Bush · Science · 1985

This study sequenced and analyzed the cheetah genome, providing molecular confirmation of the species' exceptional genetic impoverishment. The authors reported very low genome-wide heterozygosity, ext…

Pavel Dobrynin, Stephen J. O'Brien, et al. · Genome Biology · 2015

The extinct American cheetah of the genus Miracinonyx superficially resembled the living cheetah, with adaptations for fast pursuit of swift prey such as the pronghorn. This overview surveys genetic a…

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…

The cheetah and the extinct American cheetah independently evolved a slender, long-limbed body built for high-speed pursuit, a striking case of convergence given their separate ancestries within the p…

Beyond the terminal-Pleistocene crash, researchers have proposed that the cheetah experienced more than one demographic bottleneck, including a possible older, deeper reduction in the ancestral lineag…

Although cheetahs are genetically depleted overall, they are not uniform across their range, and several subspecies are recognized, including the southern and eastern African cheetahs, the northwest A…

The Asiatic cheetah survives only in Iran, reduced to a few dozen individuals, the last remnant of a subspecies that once ranged across southwest Asia and India. This overview surveys genetic studies…

The tabby patterns of cats, mackerel stripes versus blotched swirls, arise from the interaction of genes that establish a prepattern in the developing skin and then translate it into dark and light ha…

First described in the early twentieth century from southern Africa, the king cheetah's bold blotches and stripes led some naturalists to propose it as a distinct species, Acinonyx rex. This overview…

One of the most counterintuitive results of felid molecular phylogenetics was that the cheetah, long treated as a unique outlier, belongs to a New World puma lineage alongside the puma and the jaguaru…

This study identified the gene responsible for the dramatic blotched coat of the king cheetah and the related variation between mackerel and blotched tabby patterns in domestic cats. The authors mappe…

Christopher B. Kaelin, Gregory S. Barsh, et al. · Science · 2012