Alignments of reindeer/caribou mitogenome sequences

Climate warming at the end of the last glacial period had profound effects on the distribution of cold-adapted species. As their range shifted towards northern latitudes, they were able to colonise previously glaciated areas, including remote Arctic islands. However, there is still uncertainty about their colonisation routes and timings. At the end of the last ice age, reindeer/caribou (Rangifer tarandus) expanded to the Holarctic region and colonised the archipelagos of Svalbard and Franz Josef Land. Earlier studies have proposed two possible colonisation routes, either from the Eurasian mainland or from Canada via Greenland. Here, we used 174 ancient, historical, and modern mitogenomes to reconstruct the phylogeny of reindeer across its whole range and to infer the colonisation route of the Arctic islands. Our data shows a close affinity among Svalbard, Franz Josef Land, and Novaya Zemlya reindeer. We also found tentative evidence for positive selection in the mitochondrial gene ND4, ..., , , # Alignments of reindeer/caribou mitogenome sequences

This dataset consists of two FASTA files, which are the multiple sequence alignments used in the phylogenetic and haplotype network analyses in our study.

**Alignment_83_Phylogeny.fasta** contains 83 sequences used in the phylogenetic analysis.

**Alignment_166_HaplotypeNetwork.fasta** contains 166 sequences used in the haplotype network analysis.