Credit: Nikolay Zinoviev
Study Take-Aways:
Different African populations were genetically interrelated suggesting abundant gene flow across Africa such that all African population should be considered together as single subspecies.
There appeared a striking genomic distance between leopards living in Asia vs. leopards in Africa.
Asian leopards are more genetically separated from African leopards than brown bear species are from polar bear species, the researchers found.
The two leopard groups actually diverged around the same time as Neanderthals split apart from modern humans.
The genetic differences between African and Asian leopards have been maintained since 500,000 to 600,000 years ago. Asian leopards retain markedly less overall genetic variation than is seen in African leopards.
Credit: Genome 10K Project
Study Take-Aways Unprecedented novel discoveries have implications for characterizing biodiversity for all life, conservation, and human health and disease.
o This finding provides novel avenues of research to increase immune defenses, particularly relevant for emerging infectious diseases, such as the current COVID-19 pandemic. The flagship paper presented whole genome sequence analyses of 16 vertebrate species to illustrate high quality, near error free, near complete, low cost reference genome assemblies.
o Though near 400 species have been sequenced at some level, the quality today reflects a quantum leap in precision sequence details and discovery.
FORT LAUDERDALE/DAVIE, Fla. - Two decades ago, the full genome sequence of humankind was released. It was funded by international government and philanthropic sources at a cost of billions of dollars.
Credit: Victor Huertas
FORT LAUDERDALE/DAVIE, Fla. - Global warming or climate change. It doesn t matter what you call it. What matters is that right now it is having a direct and dramatic effect on marine environments across our planet. More immediately pressing than future climate change is the increasing frequency and severity of extreme underwater heatwaves that we are already seeing around the world today, Lauren Nadler, Ph.D., who is an assistant professor in Nova Southeastern University s (NSU) Halmos College of Arts and Sciences . This phenomenon is what we wanted to both simulate and understand.
Nadler is a co-author of a new study on this topic, which you can find published online at