Isolation and characterization of twenty-five polymorphic microsatellite markers in Siniperca scherzeri Steindachner and cross-species amplification

Abstract

The golden mandarin fish (Siniperca scherzeri Steindachner) is one of the commercially important freshwater species mainly distributed in east Asia (Deng et al. 2010). Unfortunately, the wild S. scherzeri population is declining due to overexploitation and environmental pollution in their habitat (Wang et al. 2006; Luo et al. 2011), which could also cause the decline of genetic diversity. Artificial reproduction and selective breeding programmes have been undertaken to meet market demand of S. scherzeri (Yang et al. 2007; Mi et al. 2010), but the genetic diversity of cultured population tends to be lower than wild population, particularly for those under selective breeding (Sunden and Davis 1991; Wang et al. 2012). Understanding of the population structure is important to test hypotheses about diversification and speciation (McDonald 2003) and to find appropriate strategies for the conservation of biodiversity (Cegelski et al. 2003). Molecular markers are an important tool for evaluating levels and patterns of genetic diversity and have been used to study genetic diversity in a number of cultured fish species (Liu and Cordes 2004). Among the various molecular markers, the most informative and polymorphic are microsatellite markers (simple sequence repeats), which have been extensively used to evaluate genetic diversity (Serrano et al. 2009; Missohou et al. 2011). However, there is still limited number of available microsatellite markers (SSRs) for S. scherzeri (Yang et al. 2012). Transcriptome assemblies of the F1 interspecies hybrids between S. chuatsi (♀) × S. scherzeri (♂) were generated using Illumina sequencing. In this study, 25 novel polymorphic SSR markers were developed for S. scherzeri from transcriptome of F1 interspecies hybrids. Additionally, cross-