AutomAted RepeaT Identifier (AARTI): A tool to identify common, polymorphic, and unique microsatellites

Abstract

Here we are presenting an automated computational pipeline used to mine 5976 mitochondrial genomes to identify common, polymorphic, and unique microsatellites also known as simple sequence repeats (SSRs). Microsatellites are repetitive motifs of 1–6 bases in a DNA sequence. Due to their abundance and highly polymorphic nature, microsatellites have become one of the widely used molecular/genetic markers valuable for many studies including gene tagging, genetic diversity, and species identification. Several computational tools dedicated to mine and categorize microsatellites in nucleotide sequences were developed; however, there is no tool which can identify unique, common and polymorphic microsatellites between each pair of nucleotide sequences. To explore such microsatellites, we have developed a fully automated computational pipeline named AutomAted RepeaT Identifier (AARTI). The AARTI is the only tool till date, which identifies common, polymorphic, and unique microsatellites between each pair of nucleotide sequences. The computational pipeline was constructed using the PERL programming language and the web server for the pipeline was developed with the help of PHP, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. It was successfully tested to reproduce the results of previous study on 7 mitochondrial genomes of genus Orthotrichum. Moreover, the pipeline was also applied on 5846 (Metazoa) and 130 (Viridiplantae) mitochondrial genomes. The AARTI is freely available at https://lms.snu.edu.in/aarti/ and will certainly accelerate the studies of length variation in microsatellites between species. Additionally, it will be useful in comparative genomic studies, for the computational characterization of microsatellites, and has the potential to be a routine genome analysis pipeline for mitochondrial genomes.