Cheetah_WGS_poolseq_VCF

While recent advances in genomics has enabled vast improvements in the quantification of genome-wide diversity and the identification of adaptive and deleterious alleles in model species, wildlife and non-model species have largely not reaped the same benefits. Here, we demonstrate the utility of cross-species genome alignment methods in gaining insights into population structure and functional genomic features in the cheetah, snow leopard and Sumatran tiger, relative to the domestic cat. <br><br>Alignment of the big cats to the domestic cat reference assembly yielded 38M variants in cheetah, 15.5M variants in snow leopards and 13.4M variants in the Sumatran tiger. These were annotated to delineate population structure and reveal insights into adaptive traits, evolutionary history and the parthenogenesis of heritable diseases. <br>