Characterization of ten polymorphic microsatellite markers for an endangered butterfly Argynnis niobe and their cross-species utility in the closely related species A. adippe (Lepidoptera: Nymphalidae)

Jan Zima,Dan Leština,Martin Konvička

doi:10.14411/eje.2013.098

Abstract

The Niobe Fritillary, Argynnis niobe, is a habitat specialist and as a consequence is highly endangered in contemporary Europe. To investigate its genetic diversity and population structure, 10 polymorphic microsatellite loci were developed and characterized, using a recently developed pyrosequencing method. The number of alleles per locus ranged from 2 to 21, and the observed and expected heterozygosities varied from 0.17 to 0.53 and from 0.24 to 0.92, respectively. These loci were also successfully used to study the genetic diversity of a closely related species, the High Brown Fritillary, Argynnis adippe, and will be used in future population structure studies of both these species.

Highlights

Molecular markers are increasingly used in insect conservation biology as they are a cheaper and more reliable way of estimating critical population parameters important for population management, such as intra-population genetic diversity, gene flow, spatial population differentiation and effective population size (Amos & Balmford, 2001; Palsboll et al, 2007)
The development of microsatellite markers using the pyrosequencing method has greatly facilitated their use in molecular ecology by reducing the cost and the time required to analyze samples (Santana et al, 2009)
The population genetic parameters based on our ten loci are already informative and non-trivial, hinting at the occurrence of interesting evolutionary phenomena within the populations studied

Summary

Introduction

Molecular markers are increasingly used in insect conservation biology as they are a cheaper and more reliable way of estimating critical population parameters important for population management, such as intra-population genetic diversity, gene flow, spatial population differentiation and effective population size (Amos & Balmford, 2001; Palsboll et al, 2007). Microsatellite markers are widely used because they are codominant, hyper variable, mostly neutral and reproducible (Jarne & Lagoda, 1996) Despite these advantages microsatellite markers have not been widely used in studies on some well studied model groups, notably butterflies and other Lepidoptera, because the sequences flanking microsatellites in this group are very similar for different loci. These similarities are generated by recombination mediated events, such as unequal crossingover or gene conversion and through transposition of mobile elements (Van’t Hof et al, 2007). These problems have been resolved thanks to next-generation sequencing methodology, which allow the rapid identification of large numbers of bioinformatically variable loci, without the necessity of laborious and costly cloning (Vandewoestijne et al, 2012)

Methods

Results

Conclusion