Daniel Kleinman-Ruiz

• PhD
• University of Vigo

The Iberian lynx was at the brink of extinction by the year 2000 but has since then, and thanks to intensive conservation measures, gone through a remarkable recovery, providing a much‐welcomed and encouraging conservation success story. Genetic issues have probably contributed to the decline in the past, and the genetic management of inbreeding an...

Genetic rescue is considered a promising but underutilised conservation strategy to mitigate inbreeding depression and restore genetic diversity. Yet, empirical evidence supporting its long-term efficacy is limited to studies investigating short-term effects. Here, we conducted an experiment with Drosophila to test the long-term efficiency of genet...

Deleterious mutations continuously accumulate in populations, building up a burden that can threaten their survival, particularly in small populations when inbreeding exposes recessive deleterious effects. Notwithstanding, this process also triggers genetic purging, which can reduce the deleterious burden and mitigate fitness inbreeding depression....

Disentangling the contribution of long‐term evolutionary processes and recent anthropogenic impacts to current genetic patterns of wildlife species is key for assessing genetic risks and designing conservation strategies. Here, we used 80 whole nuclear genomes and 96 mitogenomes from populations of the Eurasian lynx covering a range of conservation...

Background The Iberian lynx (Lynx pardinus) has been acknowledged as the most endangered felid species in the world. An intense contraction and fragmentation during the twentieth century left less than 100 individuals split in two isolated and genetically eroded populations by 2002. Genetic monitoring and management so far have been based on 36 STR...

Simulation and quantitative genetics studies have shown that, in populations with a moderately low census size (40 < N < 100), the inbreeding that is generated in panmixia is enough to produce an effective genetic purging of the deleterious burden. However, there is a lack of detailed information about these processes at the genomic level. Our aim...

Since 2015, following reintroductions, an Iberian lynx population in Vale do Guadiana (Portugal) has been breeding and expanding, bringing changes to both ecosystems and residents’ perceptions. We describe how ecological monitoring, genetic analysis and social surveys contribute to assess this new scenario of coexistence with ecological and social...

The Eurasian lynx (Lynx lynx) is one of the most widely distributed felids in the world. However, most of its populations started to decline a few millennia ago. Historical declines have been especially severe in Europe, and particularly in Western Europe, from where the species disappeared in the last few centuries. Here, we analyze the genome of...

The north-eastern European lowland population of the lynx is commonly attributed to the “Baltic population” and believed to belong to the nominative subspecies Lynx lynx lynx. Geographically, its range extends from eastern Poland throughout the Baltic states north to Fennoscandia and east to central Asia. Within its range across north-eastern Europ...

Aim Genome‐wide genetic data can provide key input for both taxonomy and conservation, but its use in this context remains limited. In this study, we performed the first genome‐wide assessment of genetic variation in two populations of the Eurasian lynx, the Balkan population, the most threatened, and the Caucasian population, a possible glacial re...

Demographic bottlenecks generally reduce genetic diversity through more intense genetic drift, but their net effect may vary along the genome due to the random nature of genetic drift and to local effects of recombination, mutation and selection. Here, we analysed the changes in genetic diversity following a bottleneck by comparing whole‐genome div...

Genome-wide database of putatively deleterious missense mutations (as determined with Provean) and loss-of-function (LoF) mutations from 31 Iberian lynx (Lynx pardinus) and 29 Eurasian lynx (Lynx lynx) individuals, corresponding to PNAS article https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2110614119

Ex situ programmes have become critical for improving the conservation of many threatened species, as they establish backup populations and provide individuals for reintroduction and reinforcement of wild populations. The Iberian lynx was considered the most threatened felid species in the world in the wake of a dramatic decline during the second h...

La conservación de la biodiversidad en un escenario de cambio global acelerado constituye uno de los grandes retos de la humanidad para las próximas décadas. La genética ha pasado a ser un elemento fundamental del enfoque multidisciplinar que esta tarea requiere, dando origen al área de conocimiento de la genética de la conservación. El papel de la...

In recent years, inbreeding and coancestry are being estimated from genome-wide molecular information using a large number of SNPs. Molecular inbreeding and coancestry can be calculated for the whole genome or for particular regions of the genome. In this study, genome-based inbreeding and coancestry were estimated per chromosome and at intra-chrom...