Methods for isolating microsatellite DNA loci from genomic DNA and the applications in aquatic animals

Microsatellite DNAs, or single sequence repeats (SSRs), are small array of one to six tandemly repeated bases that spread throughout the genome. Microsatellite DNAs are highly polymorphic, abundant, co-dominantly inheritant, simple in practice and readily transferable. Thus they have been widely used in many fields and have become one of the most popular molecular markers. Yet microsatellite DNAs need to be isolated de novo from species that are being examined for the first time. There are a number of ways to obtain microsatellite markers from genomic DNA. The aim of the present paper is to review the state-of-the-art methods of microsatellite DNA isolation for reference.