RESEARCH ARTICLE
Development of New Microsatellite (STR) Markers for Montagu’s Harrier (Circus pygargus) via 454 Shot-Gun Pyrosequencing
Susann Janowski1, *, Markus A. Grohme2, Marcus Frohme2, Michael Wink1
Article Information
Identifiers and Pagination:
Year: 2014Volume: 7
First Page: 11
Last Page: 18
Publisher Id: TOOENIJ-7-11
DOI: 10.2174/1874453201407010011
Article History:
Received Date: 23/01/2014Revision Received Date: 15/04/2014
Acceptance Date: 07/05/2014
Electronic publication date: 30/5/2014
Collection year: 2014
open-access license: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (CC-BY 4.0), a copy of which is available at: (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode). This license permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Abstract
During the last decades the ground-breeding Montagu’s harrier (Circus pygargus, Linnaeus, 1758) has changed its breeding habitats in Europe to agricultural areas in which many local populations would be close to extinction without a special nest protection regime. Although Montagu’s harrier is a well-studied species in terms of ecology and breeding biology, its genetic structure and population genetics are almost unknown. As there is a lack of good genetic markers we developed a set of 19 microsatellite markers comprising 16 new STR markers which were identified by next-generation sequencing (NGS) using 454 shot-gun pyrosequencing of genomic DNA. The STR markers were arranged into three multiplex PCR sets for high throughput genotyping and characterised. The marker set provides a powerful tool for kinship analysis. The combined non-exclusion probability for parent pairs was 1.13*10-11. Only three loci showed PIC values < 0.50. In total, 121 known family relationships were compared with genetically calculated ones to test the markers suitability for parentage analysis. In 97.5% of all cases full-sibships were accurately determined and 97.6% of all mothers were assigned correctly to their chicks. The present multiplex PCR panels can be used to investigate several hypotheses concerning breeding behaviour, kinship, exchange rates between populations and phylogeography.