Microsatellite polymorphisms reveal phylogenetic relationships in primates

Abstract

We amplified, via PCR, DNA segments from intron 1 of the tyrosine hydroxylase gene (TH01) and intron 40 of the von Willebrand factor gene (VWA) in ten nonhuman primate genera. In humans both introns contain polymorphic microsatellites with tetrameric repeats. Compared to the allelic ranges in human populations relatively short repeat arrays could be detected for the nonhuman primates typed, presumably reflecting an ancient precursor state at both microsatellite loci. Furthermore, our results provide evidence for an association of the average number of repeats present in different primate genera and their divergence time from man. DNA sequencing of VWA orthologues revealed a relatively high variability in the arrangement of repeats in the 5'-repeat arrays, the generation of which could probably be explained by polar mutational events.

Validation of Highly Polymorphic Fluorescent Multiplex Short Tandem Repeat Systems Using Two Generations of DNA Sequencers

“…8) and only sequencing experiments (25), 127.84 (27) This series of results suggest that the STR loci under study have predated the divergence between humans and chimpanzees. A similar observation was made by other investigators concerning been conserved throughout evolution, with profiles in chimpanzees showing a tendency towards smaller STR alleles for HumD3S1358 other STR loci (59,65). Sex typing results also revealed that gender determination in (122 to 130 bases versus 114 to 142 bases), HumD21S11 (184 to 212 bases versus 202 to 250 bases) and HumFGA (260 to 272 domestic and wild game animals, as well as in orangutan and Old World monkeys, was not possible using the human amelogenin bases versus 238 to 372).…”

“…Previous nonhuman DNA studies carried out on some tetranuIn our study, the level of degradation was not significant enough cleotide STR loci and amelogenin (18,38,40,49,(58)(59)(60) indicated to eliminate amplification signals from the STR loci HumD21S11 that human STR primers will anneal to genomic sequences of aniand HumFGA, but sufficient to reduce the yield of amplified prodmals, in particular Higher Primates (chimpanzee, gorilla and oranucts by a factor of approximately 2.…”

Use of SSR fragment length homozygotes for orangutan systematics

“…2) exhibited similar patterns to those described in MEYER et al (1995), who unfortunately, did not specify the collection localities of their Pongo sequences. That is the hominoid orthologs of the vWF gene showed variation in the organization of TCTA and TCTG repeats at the 5'end of the repeat array.…”

“…The vWF locus exhibited size polymorphisms in all taxa compared (MEYER et al, 1995;MORIN et al, 1997) in this study but very little fragment size heterozygosity was observed for the orangutans (n=56). Gel electrophoresis of PCR products for this locus revealed single bands of identical length in all orangutans except for individuals from Sarawak, Kutai, and Sumatra 24, each of which appeared to exhibit a single band shorter by one (tetranucleotide) motif than that of the rest.…”

“…The conservation of non-coding simple sequence repeat (SSR) loci across closely related taxa (DEKA et al, I994;BRUFORD et al, 1996;MEYER et al, 1995) allows for convenient crossspecies amplification of these loci using specific oligonucleotide primers for the polymerase chain reaction (PCR, SAIKI et al, 1988). The successful use of human primers for this purpose has been described for several non-human primate species (MOR1N & WOODRUFF, 1992;BOWCOCK et al, 1994;MORIN et al, 1997;SMITH et al, 1999;ELY et al, in press).…”