Genetic Diversity and Population History of Golden Monkeys (Rhinopithecus roxellana)

Genetic Diversity and Population History of Golden Monkeys (Rhinopithecus roxellana)

Haipeng Li^a,e, Shi-Jie Meng^c, Zheng-Ming Men^d, Yun-Xin Fu^e,b, and Ya-Ping Zhang^a,b
^a Laboratory of Molecular Evolution and Genome Diversity, Kunming Institute of Zoology, Chinese Academy of Science, Kunming 650223, China,
^b Laboratory for Conservation and Utilization of Bio-Resource, Yunnan University, Kunming 650991, China,
^c Department of Biology, Northwest University, 710069 China,
^d Department of Animals, Gansu Agricultural University, Lanzhou 730070, China
^e Human Genetics Center, University of Texas, Houston, Texas 77030

Corresponding author: Ya-Ping Zhang, Kunming Institute of Zoology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Kunming 650223, Peoples' Republic of China., zhangyp{at}public.km.yn.cn (E-mail)

Communicating editor: W. STEPHAN

Golden monkey (Rhinopithecus roxellana), namely the snub-nosedmonkey, is a well-known endangered primate, which distributesonly in the central part of mainland China. As an effort tounderstand the current genetic status as well as populationhistory of this species, we collected a sample of 32 individualsfrom four different regions, which cover the major habitat ofthis species. Forty-four allozyme loci were surveyed in ourstudy by allozyme electrophoresis, none of which was found tobe polymorphic. The void of polymorphism compared with thatof other nonhuman primates is surprising particularly consideringthat the current population size is many times larger than thatof some other endangered species. Since many independent lociare surveyed in this study, the most plausible explanation forour observation is that the population has experienced a recentbottleneck. We used a coalescent approach to explore variousscenarios of population bottleneck and concluded that the mostrecent bottleneck could have happened within the last 15,000years. Moreover, the proposed simulation approach could be usefulto researchers who need to analyze the non- or low-polymorphismdata.

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