Authors
Pablo Librado, Clio Der Sarkissian, Luca Ermini, Mikkel Schubert, Hákon Jónsson, Anders Albrechtsen, Matteo Fumagalli, Melinda A Yang, Cristina Gamba, Andaine Seguin-Orlando, Cecilie D Mortensen, Bent Petersen, Cindi A Hoover, Belen Lorente-Galdos, Artem Nedoluzhko, Eugenia Boulygina, Svetlana Tsygankova, Markus Neuditschko, Vidhya Jagannathan, Catherine Thèves, Ahmed H Alfarhan, Saleh A Alquraishi, Khaled AS Al-Rasheid, Thomas Sicheritz-Ponten, Ruslan Popov, Semyon Grigoriev, Anatoly N Alekseev, Edward M Rubin, Molly McCue, Stefan Rieder, Tosso Leeb, Alexei Tikhonov, Eric Crubézy, Montgomery Slatkin, Tomas Marques-Bonet, Rasmus Nielsen, Eske Willerslev, Juha Kantanen, Egor Prokhortchouk, Ludovic Orlando
Publication date
2015/12/15
Journal
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Volume
112
Issue
50
Pages
E6889-E6897
Publisher
National Academy of Sciences
Description
Yakutia, Sakha Republic, in the Siberian Far East, represents one of the coldest places on Earth, with winter record temperatures dropping below −70 °C. Nevertheless, Yakutian horses survive all year round in the open air due to striking phenotypic adaptations, including compact body conformations, extremely hairy winter coats, and acute seasonal differences in metabolic activities. The evolutionary origins of Yakutian horses and the genetic basis of their adaptations remain, however, contentious. Here, we present the complete genomes of nine present-day Yakutian horses and two ancient specimens dating from the early 19th century and ∼5,200 y ago. By comparing these genomes with the genomes of two Late Pleistocene, 27 domesticated, and three wild Przewalski’s horses, we find that contemporary Yakutian horses do not descend from the native horses that populated the region until the mid-Holocene …
Scholar articles
P Librado, C Der Sarkissian, L Ermini, M Schubert… - Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2015