Genomic Diversity as a Key Conservation Criterion: Proof-of-Concept From Mammalian Whole-Genome Resequencing Data.

ABSTRACT: Many international, national, state, and local organizations prioritize the ranking of threatened and endangered species to help direct conservation efforts. For example, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) assesses the Green Status of species and publishes the influential Red List of threatened species. Unfortunately, such conservation yardsticks do not explicitly consider genetic or genomic diversity (GD), even though GD is positively associated with contemporary evolutionary fitness, individual viability, and with future evolutionary potential. To test whether populations of genome sequences could help improve conservation assessments, we estimated GD metrics from 82 publicly available mammalian datasets and examined their statistical association with attributes re

SUBMITTER: Jeon JY 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11386325 | biostudies-literature | 2024 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature