GENETIC DIVERSITY AMONG COMMON LEOPARDS INHABITING AZAD JAMMU AND KASHMIR, PAKISTAN - S. S. Bibi; A. Rehman; R. A. Minhas; S. Andleeb; M. S. Awan; K. William (Journal of Animal and Plant Sciences, 2015)
The common leopard (Panthera pardus) is one of the highly threatened species of big cats in Pakistan. Azad Jammu and Kashmir (AJK) is among the main distribution areas of these leopards but due to poaching, habitat fragmentation and other anthropogenic activities, there is a rapid decline of the population in the state. We carried out the study to analyze the genetic diversity of common leopard in Azad Jammu and Kashmir (AJK).We used skin samples that were collected from the killed leopards by farmers and local hunters from six different localities of AJK. We used phenol chloroform triton modified method to extract the DNA and used four SSR markers (FCA043, FCA026, FCA075 and FCA090) to analyze genetic diversity by using PCR-based simple sequence repeat (SSR) analysis. We also calculated Allelic frequencies, Nei’s genetic diversities index (within and among populations) and Shannon information index with POPGENE 32 program which showed that highest genetic distance (0.4275) was established between the Kotli (Pop-6) and Hattian (Pop-3) populations, and lowest between Hattian (Pop-3) and Neelum (Pop-2) populations (0.0393) of common leopard. Mean gene flow (Nm) was found to be 0.8030 which showed low level of gene flow between different populations and higher level genetic differentiation between populations supported our hypothesis of habitat fragmentation. According to Luikart et al. (1998) for
Keywords: journal article; SSR analysis; gene flow; genetic distance