Alfred L. Roca

TL;DR: A genetic assessment of 979 domestic cats and their wild progenitors revealed that cats were domesticated in the Near East, probably coincident with agricultural village development in the Fertile Crescent.

TL;DR: The output from SmileFinder can be used to plot percentile values to look for population diversity and divergence patterns that may suggest past actions of positive selection along chromosome maps, and to compare lists of suspected candidate genes under random gene sets to test for the overrepresentation of these patterns among gene categories.

TL;DR: The genome sequence of an inbred Abyssinian domestic cat was assembled, mapped, and annotated with a comparative approach that involved cross-reference to annotated genome assemblies of six mammals, shedding new light on the tempo and mode of gene/genome evolution in mammals and promising several research applications for the cat.

TL;DR: Dart-biopsy samples from 195 free-ranging African elephants in 21 populations were examined for DNA sequence variation in four nuclear genes and showed large genetic distance, multiple genetically fixed nucleotide site differences, morphological and habitat distinctions, and extremely limited hybridization of gene flow support the recognition and conservation management of two African species.

TL;DR: The persistence of residual forest elephant mitochondria in savanna elephant herds renders evolutionary interpretations based on mitochondrial DNA alone misleading and preserves a genomic record of ancient habitat changes.