PCR‐amplified microsatellites as markers in plant genetics

Abstract

SummaryIn order to assess the feasibility of using microsatellites as markers in plant genetics, a survey of published DNA sequence data for presence, abundance and ubiquity in higher plants of all types of dinucleotide and trinucleotide repeats with a minimum number of 10 and 7 units, respectively, was conducted. This search revealed that such microsatellites are frequent and widely distributed; they were uncovered in 34 species, with a frequency of one every 50 kb. AT repeats were by far the most frequently observed class of dinucleotide microsatellites, whereas ACffG repeats, which are common in animals, were observed only once. TAT repeats prevailed among trinucleotides. Polymerase chain reaction amplification of (AT), and (TAT), microsatellites in soybean (Glycine max (L.) Merr.) revealed that they are highly polymorphic, as a consequence of length variation, somatically stable and inherited in a co-dominant Mendelian manner. The abundance and amount of information derived from such markers, together with the ease by which they can be identified, make them ideal markers for plant genetic linkage and physical mapping, population studies and varietal identification.

Genetic variability among local apricots (Prunus armeniaca L.) from the Southeast of Spain

“…Apricot diversity and genetic relationships have been studied using isozymes (Byrne and Littleton, 1989;Badenes et al, 1996), restriction fragment length polymorphisms (RFLPs) (De Vicente et al, 1998), random amplified polymorphic DNA (RAPDs) (Badenes et al, 2000), amplified fragment length polymorphisms (AFLPs) (Hagen et al, 2002;Hurtado et al, 2002) and sequence characterised amplified regions (SCARs) (Mariniello et al, 2002). However, most of these early types of molecular markers have been displaced by others, such as microsatellites (simple sequence repeat, SSR) -which are co-dominant and offer significant advantages in terms of reproducibility and simplicity (Morgante and Olivieri, 1993). There is already a considerable literature related to the use of microsatellites in the study of genetic relationships in apricot (Hormaza, 2001(Hormaza, , 2002Romero et al, 2003;Zhebentyayeva et al, 2003;Sánchez-Pérez et al, 2004;Krichen et al, 2006;Tian-Ming et al, 2007).…”

The use of wheat aneuploids for the chromosomal assignment of microsatellite loci

“…human (Weissenbach et al, 1992), mouse (Copeland et al, 1993), cattle (Bishop et al, 1994) and pig (Rohrer et al, 1994). This simple sequence repeats are also abundant in many important crops (Morgante & Olivieri, 1993), and were found to be more polymorphic than RFLP markers when small numbers of MS were investigated in soybean, rice, Arabidopsis or barley (Akkaya et al, 1992;Wu & Tanksley, 1993;Bell & Ecker, 1994;Maroof et al, 1994). Microsatellites as a marker system have the potential to be especially useful for selfpollinating crops like wheat due to their high level of polymorphism based on different numbers of repeats in different lines/accessions at a given locus.…”

Frequent in-frame length variations are found in the diverged simple repeat sequences of the protein-coding regions of two putative protein kinase genes of Brassica napus

“…Polymerase chain reaction studies have revealed that microsatellite sequences in several plant genes are polymorphic in their length [4,9]. In addition, the The nucleotide sequence data reported will appear in the EMBL, GenBank and DDBJ Nucleotide Sequence Databases under the accession numbers L12393 (pBSK1) and L12394 (pBSK2).…”