Genotyping and genetic diversity analyses
We genotyped leopard cats using a combination of mitochondrialcytb markers and nuclear DNA microsatellite. We utilized 12 previously published microsatellites (Menotti-Raymond et al., 1999) in the final analyses. Primer information and the methods for genotyping are described in detail in the SMM. Diversity indices for microsatellite loci, including polymorphism information content (PIC) , probability of identity (PID) , expected heterozygosity (H e), observed heterozygosity (H o), F IS and deviation from Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium, were calculated using Cervus v3.0.7 (Kalinowski, Taper, & Marshall, 2007). Allelic richness was calculated in FSTAT v2.9.4 (Goudet, 1995). We checked for the presence and frequencies of null alleles using Brookfield’s method implemented in Micro-Checker v2.2.3 (Van Oosterhout et al., 2004).
For cytb , a single sample downloaded from NCBI (FCN3, accession number: AB210227) was added to our own dataset for subsequent analyses. Tajimas’ D , as well as Fu and Li’s F and D , were tested to detect selection or demographic changes. All neutrality tests and diversity indices of haplotype diversity (Hd ) and nucleotide diversity (π) were computed using DnaSP v6 (Rozas et al., 2017). The haplotype network was constructed using the median-joining method implemented in PopArt (Leigh & Bryant, 2015).