Exome sequences of toque macaques (<i>Macaca sinica</i>) of Sri Lanka reveal many amino acid changes

<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title><jats:p>Macaques are one of the most widely used model organisms in biomedical research. <jats:italic>Macaca mulatta</jats:italic> and <jats:italic>M. fascicularis</jats:italic> are currently being used for toxicology, HIV, diabetes, neuroscience and psychiatric and psychological disorder researches. Many studies have been conducted on <jats:italic>M. mulatta</jats:italic> and <jats:italic>M. fascicularis</jats:italic> genomes for this purpose in order to understand the genomic properties of these species. Several <jats:italic>M. fascicularis</jats:italic> individuals from different geographical locations and also <jats:italic>M. mulatta</jats:italic> genomes have been sequenced and studied in depth for the purpose of understanding the phylogenetic and evolutionary relationships between various macaque populations. But still a gap in knowledge remains for other macaque populations such as the <jats:italic>Sinica</jats:italic> group. In this study for the very first time, we sequenced the exome of toque macaques (<jats:italic>M. sinica</jats:italic>), an endemic island population of Sri Lanka. Here we confirmed that <jats:italic>M. sinica</jats:italic> and <jats:italic>M. thibetana</jats:italic> cluster together and are closely related, also the three distinct phylogenetic groupings of <jats:italic>fascicularis</jats:italic> and <jats:italic>sinica</jats:italic>. We also found that <jats:italic>M. sinica</jats:italic> has less number of polymorphisms with respect to the reference genome <jats:italic>M. mulatta</jats:italic> signifying the smaller and restricted population size of this species.</jats:p>