Large-scale identification of polymorphic microsatellites using an in silico approach

Background: Simple Sequence Repeat (SSR) or microsatellite markers are valuable for genetic research. Experimental methods to develop SSR markers are laborious, time consuming and expensive. In silico approaches have become a practicable and relatively inexpensive alternative during the last decade, although testing putative SSR markers still is time consuming and expensive. In many species only a relatively small percentage of SSR markers turn out to be polymorphic. This is particularly true for markers derived from expressed sequence tags (ESTs). In EST databases a large redundancy of sequences is present, which may contain information on length-polymorphisms in the SSR they contain, and whether they have been derived from heterozygotes or from different genotypes. Up to now, although a number of programs have been developed to identify SSRs in EST sequences, no software can detect putatively polymorphic SSRs. Results: We have developed PolySSR, a new pipeline to identify polymorphi...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2008
• Where: BMCBI
• Authors: Jifeng Tang, Samantha J. Baldwin, Jeanne M. E. Jacobs, C. Gerard van der Linden, Roeland E. Voorrips, Jack A. M. Leunissen, Herman van Eck, Ben Vosman
• Keywords: BMCBI 2008, Polymorphic Ssrs, Putative Ssr Markers, SSR Markers