4.3 Genetic diversity and conservation status of takin
Being a vulnerable species (Zeng and Song 2002), the genetic diversity of golden takin was very low (θπ=0.00028 and heterozygosity=0.00038), which was even lower than that of the Qinling giant pandas and snub-nosed monkeys who live in the same habitat. The high inbreeding coefficient (FROH=0.217) indicated that golden takins presented inbreeding depression. The long ROH represents recent inbreeding events, while the shorter ROH stems from an ancient process or mating between distant relatives (van der Valk et al. 2019). We speculated that the golden takins in our study had always been inbreeding from 5th to 20th generations. These results indicated that the golden takin was in a highly inbreeding state (Kardos et al. 2021). It has been reported that the number of golden takin is only about 3, 500 in Qinling mountains (Zeng et al. 2003). It is probably that the golden takin is currently endangered. Therefore, it is urgent to establish the protection scheme of golden takin.