About the Authors

Wasim Shehzad

Affiliation Laboratoire d'Ecologie Alpine, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Unité Mixte de Recherche 5553, Université Joseph Fourier, Grenoble, France

Thomas Michael McCarthy

Affiliation Snow Leopard Program, Panthera, New York, New York, United States of America

Francois Pompanon

Affiliation Laboratoire d'Ecologie Alpine, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Unité Mixte de Recherche 5553, Université Joseph Fourier, Grenoble, France

Lkhagvajav Purevjav

Affiliation Snow Leopard Conservation Fund, Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia

Eric Coissac

Affiliation Laboratoire d'Ecologie Alpine, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Unité Mixte de Recherche 5553, Université Joseph Fourier, Grenoble, France

Tiayyba Riaz

Affiliation Laboratoire d'Ecologie Alpine, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Unité Mixte de Recherche 5553, Université Joseph Fourier, Grenoble, France

Pierre Taberlet

pierre.taberlet@ujf-grenoble.fr

Affiliation Laboratoire d'Ecologie Alpine, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Unité Mixte de Recherche 5553, Université Joseph Fourier, Grenoble, France

Competing Interests

EC, TR and PT are co-inventors of a pending French patent application entitled “Amorces universelles et leurutilisation pour la détection et l'identification d'espèces devertébrés” which has been submitted in France on 26 May 2011. Reference number: FR 11/54606, on the primer pair named 12SV5F and 12SV5R and on the use of the amplified fragment for identifying vertebrate species from environmental samples. This patent only restricts commercial applications and has no impact on the use of this method by academic researchers. This does not alter the authors' adherence to all the PLoS ONE policies on sharing data and materials.

Author Contributions

Conceived and designed the experiments: WS FP PT. Performed the experiments: WS. Analyzed the data: TR EC WS. Contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools: EC. Wrote the paper: WS PT TMM. Field sampling: TMM LP. Primer design: TR EC.