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The Cheetah in Genetic Peril

The world's fastest land animal is in a race for continued survival. An ancient population bottleneck has resulted in genetic uniformity and has made the species extremely vulnerable to ecological change

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About Stephen J. O'Brien

Stephen J. O’Brien was chief of the National Cancer Institute’s Laboratory of Genomic Diversity until 2012 and is now chief scientific officer at the Dobzhansky Center for Genome Bioinformatics at St. Petersburg State University in Russia. He has studied the genetics of cheetahs, giant pandas, pumas and whales and of human infection by HIV.

More by Stephen J. O'Brien
Scientific American Magazine Vol 254 Issue 5This article was originally published with the title “The Cheetah in Genetic Peril” in Scientific American Magazine Vol. 254 No. 5 (), p. 84
doi:10.1038/scientificamerican0586-84