Study of genetic diversity of Mauritian cynomolgus macaques using whole-genome sequences of six individuals.

This project is initiated and promaoted by Dr. Antoine Blancher, University of Toulouse. Cynomolgus macaques in the Mauritian island are known to be introduced to the island by humans around 16th century and have lower genetic diversity than macaques in other populations. The unique demographic history of Mauritian cynomolgus macaques provides the opportunity not only for examining the genetic background of well-established non-human primates for biomedical research, but also for understanding the effect of extreme population bottleneck on the pattern of polymorphisms in genomes. We sequenced the whole genomes of six Mauritian cynomolgus individuals and obtained on average 20-fold coverage of genome sequences for each individual using the Illumina HiSeq.