javascript:void(0)Chinese pangolins found in Nepal have highly divergent cytB sequence
Comparison of cytB sequence obtained from Chinese pangolin originating from Nepal with other publicly available Chinese pangolin sequences showed that Chinese pangolins from Nepal, group together in their own sub clade (Fig. 3). Across 424 bp of cytB sequence, the pangolin samples sequenced in this study had between 15 and 19 nucleotide differences (95.5 – 96.5% similarity) compared to reference Chinese pangolin sequences sampled in China (Hua et al. 2020), Taiwan (Sun et al. 2021) and Thailand (Gaubert et al. 2018). A neighbour joining tree grouped pangolin from Nepal as a sister clade to Chinese pangolin from China (M. p. aurita ) and Taiwan (M. p. pentadactyla ) (Fig. 3). This suggests that Chinese pangolin from Nepal represent a genetic lineage distinct from those found in China and Thailand, but the geographic extent across which pangolins with these haplotypes is distributed requires further investigation.