DNA holds all of the information that makes you, you. Think of it as a road map that outlines everything about you - the color of your eyes, whether you're right or left-handed, how tall you are, everything about you. You get this DNA from your mom and your dad. Differences in DNA from person to person lead to differences in our outward appearance and other adaptations. This includes how well we deal with oxygen availability in the air. The Tibetan community has been living at high-altitudes for thousands of years. Over this time, their DNA changed from generation to generation to making living at high-altitudes easier. This resulting in an amazing unique genetic adaptation where Tibetans don't get sick how we get sick and instead allows them to thrive with less oxygen in the air. In fact, their bodies function best at these high-altitudes, and not as well as at low-altitudes.
What's really cool is that this same thing may be happening in snow leopards! Adaptations to high-altitudes in the DNA of snow leopards are something we're interested in discovering. Especially since snow leopards can live at such wide ranges of altitudes. For example, while some snow leopards in Mongolia live at 6,000ft, others on the Tibetan Plateau live at 16,500ft! We're curious if the DNA for high-altitude adaptation from snow leopards in Mongolia looks the same for snow leopards on the Tibetan Plateau. We can do this by using a technique called Next-Generation Sequencing to exam their DNA, then compare our results between the different snow leopards.
