Microsatellite markers for molecular breeding

TLDR: Microsatellites are tandem repeats of short sequence motifs that occur ubiquitously in eukaryotic genomes and are an extraordinarily high level of variation among taxa, mainly expressed as a variable copy number of tandem repeats.

Abstract: Summary Microsatellites are tandem repeats of short sequence motifs that occur ubiquitously in eukaryotic genomes. A key feature of this class of repetitive DNA is an extraordinarily high level of variation among taxa, mainly expressed as a variable copy number of tandem repeats. A multitude of techniques were described that exploit microsatellite variability as molecular markers. Basically, these approaches can be classified into four different experimental strategies. (1) Oligonucleotides complementary to microsatellites are used as hybridization probes for multilocus RFLP fingerprinting. (2) Microsatellite-complementary oligonucleotides serve as PCR primers, either alone or in combination with arbitrary primers, to amplify certain regions of genomic DNA. (3) (Non)radioactively labelled microsatellite motifs are hybridized to electrophoretically resolved RAPD fragments, resulting in new and unexpected banding patterns on the autoradiograms. (4) Length variation of individual microsatellite loci is analy...