Baoguo Li

• Professor
• Professor at Northwest University

Despite the large amount of video data captured during ethological studies of wild mammals, there is no widely accepted method available to automatically and quantitatively measure and analyze animal behavior. We developed a framework using facial recognition and deep learning to automatically track, measure, and quantify the behavior of single or...

Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a severe psychiatric disorder, affecting approximately 25–35% of individuals exposed to significant psychological trauma. Despite extensive research, the underlying biological mechanisms of PTSD remain poorly understood, and the effectiveness of trauma-focused psychotherapeutic interventions is limited. To d...

Competition within primate groups often translates to a social hierarchy, with high‐rank individuals gaining privileged access to resources, especially food. Golden snub‐nosed monkeys Rhinopithecus roxellana live in a multi‐level society, with multiple one‐male units (OMUs), each containing a single adult male and several females, forming a breedin...

The majority of human infectious diseases originate from mammals and are inherently zoonotic. Non-human primates (NHPs) are not only carriers of many zoonotic pathogens, but also the best intermediary for virus shift from harmless to harmful due to their similar phylogenetic relationship with humans. Knowledge of NHP viral composition and its under...

A tooth-bearing mandible fossil of a colobine monkey discovered at Shuitangba, Zhaotong, Yunnan, China, was morphometrically analyzed and compared with extant Asian colobines. Our previous qualitative and quantitative descriptions indicate that it can be safely attributed to Mesopithecus pentelicus, a Miocene fossil colobine widely found in Europe...

In many vertebrates, individuals choose mates due to benefits accrued via the production of offspring of high genetic quality. Genes of the major histocompatibility complex (MHC), which are associated with individual immunocompetence, provide potential benefits to choosers who mate with individuals that possess specific MHC alleles, have MHC genoty...

Changes in diet causing ecological stress pose a significant challenge to animal survival. In response, the gut microbiota, a crucial part of the host’s digestive system, exhibits patterns of change reflective of alterations in the host’s food component. The impact of temporal dietary shifts on gut microbiota has been elucidated through multidimens...

Adoption among nonhuman primates (hereafter primates) has been widely reported, particularly in chimpanzees, renowned for their higher intelligence and well-developed cognition. In contrast to adoption in other Old World monkeys, this case of adoption in golden snub-nosed monkeys (Rhinopithecus roxellana) involves two infants associated with three...

The evolutionary development and phylogenetic division between Asian and African cercopithecoids (Cercopithecidae) have attracted significant attention in genetics, molecular biology, behavior, and morphology. However, less emphasis has been placed on how they have evolved morphologically after divergence, approximately 10 million years ago (mya) f...

Using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for surveys on thermostatic animals has gained prominence due to their ability to provide practical and precise dynamic censuses, contributing to developing and refining conservation strategies. However, the practical application of UAVs for animal monitoring necessitates the automation of image interpretation...

Simple Summary Genetic diversity plays a crucial role in determining the ability of populations to evolve. We investigated the genetic variation of the black-and-white snub-nosed monkey by integrating adaptive MHC genes and neutral microsatellites. We found that neutral loci exhibited high heterozygosity and a high degree of polymorphism, while MHC...

Understanding how climate, ecological and environmental changes, and anthropogenic activities have driven animals’ development and predicting their prospective distribution profiles are essential to making a tangible conservation strategy. Macaques (Macaca) distributed in China provide an ideal research model for such an effort. We reconstruct thei...

The dual impact of climate change and human activities has precipitated a sharp decline in primate biodiversity globally. China is home to the most diverse primate species in the Northern hemisphere, which face severe ecological threats due to the expansion of modern agriculture, extensive exploitation and consumption of natural resources, and exce...

Glycome in urine could be promising biomarkers for detecting pregnancy diagnosis and sex noninvasively for animals, especially for rare species. We explore the applicability of grouping golden snub-nosed monkeys by sex or diagnosing pregnancy based on their urinary glycopatterns, which are determined via lectin microarray combining mass spectrometr...

Small and isolated populations face several intrinsic risks, such as genetic drift, inbreeding depression and reduced gene flow, patterns of genetic diversity and differentiation have become an important focus of conservation genetics research. The golden snub-nosed monkey Rhinopithecus roxellana, an endangered species endemic to China, has experie...

The biological mechanisms that underpin primate social evolution remain poorly understood. Asian colobines display a range of social organizations, which makes them good models for investigating social evolution. By integrating ecological, geological, fossil, behavioral, and genomic analyses, we found that colobine primates that inhabit colder envi...

Substantial phylogenetic differences in the evolution of decision-making in group-living animals are observed in the animal kingdom. Decision-making is vital for maintaining a cohesive social structure, health, survival, and reproductive fitness. Thus, exploring such mechanisms in diverse social species living in the wild, especially nonhuman prima...

Genes of the major histocompatibility complex (MHC) play important roles in vertebrate immunocompetence. MHC genes thus offer females indirect benefits to mate choice through the production of offspring of an optimal MHC genotype. Females may choose males with specific MHC haplotypes, dissimilar MHC genotypes, MHC heterozygous males or MHC-diverse...

Movement patterns can reflect species-specific characteristics of individuals and animal groups at a given scale. Accurate three-dimensional (3D) assessment can quantify the relationship between movement patterns of an animal and its unique habitat. Here, we evaluated the effects of habitat structure on movement patterns of the golden snub-nosed mo...

Shift of ingestive behavior is an important strategy for animals to adapt to change of the environment. We knew that shifts in animal dietary habits lead to changes in the structure of the gut microbiota, but we are not sure about if changes in the composition and function of the gut microbiota respond to changes in the nutrient intake or food item...

Tactical deception can be beneficial for social animals during intra-specific competition. However, the use of tactical deception in wild mammals is predicted to be rare. We tested whether a food-provisioned free-ranging band of golden snub-nosed monkeys (Rhinopithecus roxellana) use alarm calls in a functionally deceptive manner to gain access to...

Polyploids are cells or organisms with a genome consisting of more than two sets of homologous chromosomes. Polyploid plants have important traits that facilitate speciation and are thus often model systems for evolutionary, molecular ecology and agricultural studies. However, due to their unusual mode of inheritance and double‐reduction, diploid m...

The golden snub-nosed monkey (Rhinopithecus roxellana) is a typical arboreal group-living Old World primate. While limb preference has been extensively studied in this species, limb preference consistency has not yet been explored. Here, based on 26 R. roxellana adults, we investigated whether individuals exhibit consistent motor biases in manual-...

Knowledge of primate evolutionary history from the Late Miocene to the present in East Asia is necessary to develop a conservation strategy for primates today and future. This background is especially evident from the distributions of fossil-bearing sites in the Pleistocene and historical records over the past 800 years. We illustrate catarrhines'...

Based on a broad literature review of journal and book publications, governmental archives, and annals, this study comprehensively examines the special contribution of Yunnan, China, to understanding East Asian catarrhines (colobines, macaques), as well as hominoids, gibbons, hominins, and modern ethnic groups since the Later Miocene or Early Plioc...

Evolutionary and historical development and current profiles are essential to generating a tangible conservation strategy. It also is critical to distinguish the regions with vigorous potential growth from those meeting evolutionary development bottlenecks and those whose development has been severely devastated. We used two sizeable national data...

Polyploids are cells or organisms with a genome consisting of more than two sets of homologous chromosomes. Polyploid plants have important traits that facilitate speciation and are thus often model systems for evolutionary, molecular ecology and agricultural studies. However, due to their unusual mode of inheritance and dou-ble-reduction, diploid...

Maternal caretaking and transport of dead infants are widespread among nonhuman primates, having been reported in numerous species of monkeys and apes. By contrast, accounts of such behaviors toward dead juveniles are scarce. Here, we describe responses by the mother and other group members to the death of a juvenile in a wild, multi-level group of...

In mammal herbivores, fiber digestion usually occurs predominantly in either the foregut or the hindgut. Reports of mechanisms showing synergistic function in both gut regions for the digestion of fiber and other nutrients in wild mammals are rare since it requires integrative study of anatomy, physiology and gut microbiome. Colobine monkeys (Colob...

Existing F -statistic estimators fail to account for any genetic correlations among individuals or subpopulations and assume that all samples are independent. This may result in inaccurate F -statistic estimations for natural populations. Here, we derive the expectations of previous F -statistics estimates using extended kinship coefficients. On th...

Linkage disequilibrium (LD) is the non-random association of alleles at different loci. Squared LD coefficients r² (for phased genotypes) and \(r_{\Delta}^2\) (for unphased genotypes) will converge to constants that are determined by the sample size, the recombination frequency, the effective population size and the mating system. LD can therefore...

Background Golden snub-nosed monkey (Rhinopithecus roxellana) is an endangered primate species, whose molecular material for conservation purposes has not yet been maintained. Although small-molecule compounds (SMCs) have been reported to improve induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs), their efficiency in the interspecies-transferred nucleus is sti...

Ethology and behavioral ecology study the behavioral traits, behavior patterns and behavior mechanisms of animals, as well as the behavior strategies to adapt to environmental changes. Here, we briefly review some significant achievements of these two research fields over the past forty years in China by focusing specifically on mammalian taxa. The...

Cattrthrines (humans and nonhuman primates) in Asia experienced similar migrating routes from Africa to East Asia but with different time frames during the Miocene and Early Pliocene. They dispersed and radiated in East and Southeast Asia during the Pliocene and Pleistocene so that one’s experiences of evolutionary development and biodiversity chan...

A systematic understanding of dynamic animal extinction trajectories for different regions in a nation like China is critically important to developing practical conservation strategies. We explored historical and contemporary changes in terrestrial mammalian diversity to determine how diversity in each of the 5 regions in China has changed over ti...

Age is a key factor affecting sexual selection, as many physical and social traits are age-related. Although studies of primate mate choice often consider particular age-related traits, few consider the collective effects of male age. We tested the hypothesis that female golden snub-nosed monkeys Rhinopithecus roxellana prefer prime aged males (10–...

Background: In mammal herbivores, the digestion of fiber usually occurs predominantly in either the foregut or in the hindgut. However, how both gut regions function synergistically in the digestion of fiber and other nutrients has rarely been reported in wild mammals. This requires an integrative study of host anatomy, physiology and gut microbiom...

In the article, Youlatos et al. (2021).

Rock piles, boulder stacks, and vertical cliffs with ledges represent terrestrial habitats with a complex and irregular network of variably positioned available substrates demanding special morphological and behavioral adaptations. In this context, the current study integrated forelimb functional morphometrics with data on the positional behavior o...

Small molecular compounds could improve the induction efficiency of induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS). To investigate their effects on the efficiency of interspecies nuclear transfers, fibroblasts from the Chuan snub-nosed monkey were treated with small molecular compounds and used as donor cells to be injected into the enucleated oocytes of a g...

Behavioural laterality in nonhuman primates has been commonly studied in paired limb organs, and studies in unpaired organs such as tails are less common. The very limited investigations on tail laterality have focused on New World primates. We firstly investigated the lateral bias of tail wrapping in an Old World primate. From a wild group of one...

Polyploidy poses several problems for parentage analysis. We present a new polysomic inheritance model for parentage analysis based on genotypes or allelic phenotypes to solve these problems. The effects of five factors are simultaneously accommodated in this model: (1) double-reduction, (2) null alleles, (3) negative amplification, (4) genotyping...

The Qinling mountainous region is one of the world's biodiversity hotspots and provides refuges for many endangered endemic animals. The golden snub-nosed monkeys (Rhinopithecus roxellana) are considered as a flagship species in this area. Here, we depicted the genetic structure and evolutionary history via microsatellite markers and combination wi...

Apposite conceptualization and measurement of resource variation is critical for understanding many issues in ecology, including ecological niches, persistence and distribution of populations, the structure of communities and population resilience to perturbations. We apply the nutritional geometry framework to conceptualize and quantify the respon...

The influence of genetic drift on linkage disequilibrium in finite populations has been extensively studied in diploids. However, to date the effects of ploidy on LD has not been extensively studied. We here extend the linkage disequilibrium measure D and Burrow’s Δ statistic to include polysomic inheritance, as well as their corresponding squared...

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1093/biosci/biaa082.].

Golden snub-nosed monkeys are endangered animals in China, and their cells have been demonstrated to be important as genetic resources and in applications for advancing biological research. Moreover, in primary research, basic fibroblast growth factor (bFGF) is used to promote the proliferation of fibroblasts to create abundant cells for cryopreser...

Both natural conditions and anthropogenic factors affect the survivability, distribution and population density of wildlife. To understand the extent and how these factors drive species distributions, a detailed description of animal movement patterns in natural habitats is needed. In this study, we used satellite telemetry to monitor elevational r...

For social primates, fast and accurate recognition of facial expressions in other individuals is crucial for regulating social interactions and group cohesion. However, the adaptive function of facial expression recognition remains largely unknown. Here, we tested whether golden snub-nosed monkeys (Rhinopithecus roxellana) can discriminate facial e...

This study presents the first evidence of effects of applying both positive and negative stimuli simultaneously on visual laterality in Old World monkeys. Thirteen captive individuals of Sichuan snub-nosed monkeys (Rhinopithecus roxellana) were chosen as focal subjects in the monocular box task. In total, 4 emotional categories (the preferred, the...

Polyploidy poses several problems for parentage analysis. We present a new polysomic inheritance model for parentage analysis based on genotypes or allelic phenotypes to solve these problems. The effects of five factors are simultaneously accommodated in this model: (i) double-reduction, (ii) null alleles, (iii) negative amplification, (iv) genotyp...

Both biotic and abiotic factors play important roles in influencing ecological distributions and niche limits. Where biotic and abiotic stressors co‐occur in space and time, homeostatic systems face a scenario in which stressors can compound to impose a challenge that is greater than the sum of the separate factors. We studied the homeostatic strat...

The analysis of molecular variance (AMOVA) is a widely used statistical method in population genetics and molecular ecology. The classic framework of AMOVA only supports haploid and diploid data, in which the number of hierarchies ranges from two to four. In practice, natural populations can be classified into more hierarchies, and polyploidy is fr...

The difficulty of obtaining reliable individual identification of animals has limited researcher’s ability to obtain quantitative data to address important ecological, behavioral and conservation questions. Traditional marking methods placed animals at undue risk. Machine learning approaches for identifying species through analysis of animal images...

Depicting a taxonomic group's evolutionary trajectory as a function of changes in the geographical landscape and its historical distribution is critical for constructing informed conservation strategies. Based on fossil sites from the Pliocene to the Holocene, and historical records since 1175 AD, we established macaques’ dispersal pathways into an...

Multilevel societies (MLSs), stable nuclear social units within a larger collective encompassing multiple nested social levels, occur in several mammalian lineages. Their architectural complexity and size impose specific demands on their members requiring adaptive solutions in multiple domains. The functional significance of MLSs lies in their memb...

With 60% of all primate species now threatened with extinction and many species only persisting in small populations in forest fragments, conservation action is urgently needed. But what type of action? Here we argue that restoration of primate habitat will be an essential component of strategies aimed at conserving primates and preventing the exti...

In mammals characterized by a mating system in which a single male monopolizes reproduction, infanticide is reported to occur following a male take-over, often resulting in females returning to oestrus more rapidly than if their infant has survived. However, over the course of a 17-year study of golden snub-nosed monkeys, Rhinopithecus roxellana, a...

In the face of ongoing habitat fragmentation, many primate species have experienced reduced gene flow resulting in a reduction of genetic diversity, population bottlenecks and inbreeding depression, including golden snub-nosed monkeys Rhinopithecus roxellana. Golden snub-nosed monkeys live in a multilevel society composed of several one male harem...

An important goal of wild animal nutritional ecology is to understand the correlation between population ecology and food resources and what dictates food choice, especially during seasonal shortages of resources. However, relevant research is scarce due to the considerable challenges in collecting and interpreting such data. Here, we used major nu...

As for the wild animals, their diet components are always changed, so that we have to monitor such changes by analyzing the modification of intestinal microbial community. Such effort allows us to amend their conservation strategies and tactics accordingly so that they are able to appropriately adapt to the new environment and dietary selection. In...

Collective decision-making is important for coordination and synchronization of the activities among group-living animals and the mechanisms guiding such procedure involve a great variety of characteristics of behavior and motivation. This study provides some evidence investigating collective movement initiation in a multi-level social band of the...

Research is a highly competitive profession where evaluation plays a central role; journals are ranked and individuals are evaluated based on their publication number, the number of times they are cited and their h-index. Yet such evaluations are often done in inappropriate ways that are damaging to individual careers, particularly for young schola...

Polyploidy has appeared in almost every ancestral plant lineage, and in extant species, occurs frequently. When present, polyploidy presents problems for genetic data analysis, which are caused by both genotypic ambiguities and double‐reduction. To address these problems, we developed a new software package, polygene , which enables the estimation...

In this article, we studied the complete chloroplast genome of Fireweed, Epilobium angustifolium, an essential herbaceous perennial species of the genus Epilobium (Onagraceae), we used Illumina sequencing platform to characterize its whole plastid genome sequence. The results showed that its whole plastid genome is a typical qudaripartite circular...

Our study presents the first evidence on how target animacy impacts on manual laterality in the Hylobatidae and contributes to filling the knowledge gap between monkeys and great apes in primate evolution of emotional lateralization. Eleven captive individuals of northern white-cheeked gibbons (Nomascus leucogenys) were chosen as focal subjects. Th...

Natal dispersals are male-biased in most Old World monkey species, especially those that are polygynous. We examined patterns of male dispersal in golden snub-nosed monkeys, in which male offspring mainly disperse as juveniles from their natal one-male units (OMUs) to a bachelor group. However, out of a total of 112 male dispersals from 2001–2016,...

Background The golden snub-nosed monkey (Rhinopithecus roxellana) is an endangered colobine species endemic to China, which has several distinct traits including a unique social structure. Although a genome assembly for R. roxellana is available, it is incomplete and fragmented because it was constructed using short-read sequencing technology. Thus...

Investigations on manual laterality in non-human primates can help clarify human evolutionary origins of hand preference and cerebral cognition. Although body posture can influence primate hand preference, investigations on how posture affects hylobatid manual laterality are still in their infancy. This study focused on how spontaneous bipedal beha...

Following significant development in technology alternative devices have been applied to field work on animal and plant surveys and environmental protection. One of them is the thermal‐image acquisition cameras installed on unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), which have been used in animal surveys on a more open environment. This article, nevertheless...

Duplicated loci, for example those associated with major histocompatibility complex (MHC) genes, often have similar DNA sequences that can be co‐amplified with a pair of primers. This results in genotyping difficulties and inaccurate analyses. We here present a method to assign alleles to different loci in amplifications of duplicated loci. This me...

A significant portion of plant species are polyploids, with ploidy levels sometimes varying among individuals and/or populations. Current techniques to determine the individual ploidy, e.g., flow cytometry, chromosome counting or genotyping‐by‐sequencing, are often cumbersome. Based on the genotypic probabilities for polysomic inheritance under dou...

Premise: Rosebay willowherb, or fireweed (Chamerion angustifolium: Onagraceae), has diploid, tetraploid, and hexaploid cytotypes. There are known physiological and ecological differences among the three cytotypes, but genetic differences remain undetermined. We developed simple sequence repeat (SSR) markers for this species. Methods and results:...

The analysis of molecular variance (AMOVA) is a widely used statistical model in the studies of population genetics and molecular ecology. The classical framework of AMOVA only supports haploid and diploid data, in which the number of hierarchies ranges from two to four. In practice, natural populations can be classified into more hierarchies, and...

Polyploids are organisms whose genomes consist of more than two complete sets of chromosomes. Both autopolyploids and allopolyploids may display polysomic inheritance. A peculiarity of polysomic inheritance is multivalent formation during meiosis resulting in double-reduction, which occurs when sister chromatid fragments segregate into the same gam...

Polyploids are organisms whose genomes consist of more than two complete sets of chromosomes. Both autopolyploids and allopolyploids may display polysomic inheritance. A peculiarity of polysomic inheritance is multivalent formation during meiosis resulting in double-reduction, which occurs when sister chromatid fragments are segregated into the sam...

Background: Maintaining variation in immune genes, such as those of the major histocompatibility complex (MHC), is important for individuals in small, isolated populations to resist pathogens and parasites. The golden snub-nosed monkey (Rhinopithecus roxellana), an endangered primate endemic to China, has experienced a rapid reduction in numbers a...

An organism’s fitness is tied closely to its ability to obtain food. However, many foods are nutritionally suboptimal on their own, forcing an individual to develop a feeding strategy that actively manages both type and amount of food consumed. Animals in captivity are additionally limited to human provisioned diets, which may be nutritionally inad...

Golden snub-nosed monkeys (Rhinopithecus roxellana), as typical arboreal group-living Old World monkeys, provide an appropriate animal model to research manual laterality and explore the factors affecting hand preference in nonhuman primates. This study investigated hand preference based on 63 subjects and four spontaneous manual tasks (including u...

China is facing an unprecedented set of challenges in balancing the effects of economic development and global climate change with environmental protection and maintaining biodiversity. Although positive steps have been undertaken to remedy this situation, currently 80% of China’s 25 extant primate species are threatened, 15–18 species have populat...

Abstract Comparative studies of subspecies under different ecological environments offer insights into intraspecies evolutionary adaptive mechanisms. Golden snub-nosed monkeys (Rhinopithecus roxellana) include three subspecies in China classified mainly by their morphological variations: R. r. roxellana (Sichuan and Gansu province), R. r. qinlingen...

Parentage analysis is an important method that is used widely in zoological and ecological studies. Current mathematical models of parentage analyses usually assume that a population has a uniform genetic structure and that mating is panmictic. In a natural population, the geographic or social structure of a population, and/or nonrandom mating, usu...

Homeostatic responses of animals to environmentally induced changes in nutrient requirements provide a powerful basis for predictive ecological models, and yet, such responses are virtually unstudied in the wild. We tested for macronutrient‐specific compensatory feeding responses by free‐ranging golden snub‐nosed monkeys ( Rhinopithecus roxellana )...

There is a great deal of spatial and temporal variation in the availability and nutritional quality of foods eaten by animals, particularly in temperate regions where winter brings lengthy periods of leaf and fruit scarcity. We analyzed the availability, dietary composition, and macronutrients of the foods eaten by the northern‐most golden snub‐nos...