High-throughput microsatellite isolation through 454 GS-FLX Titanium pyrosequencing of enriched DNA libraries

Microsatellites (or SSR: simple sequence repeat) are among the most frequently used DNA markers in many areas of research. The use of microsatellite markers is limited by the difficulties involved in their de novo isolation from species for which no genomic resources are available. We describe here a high-throughput method for isolating microsatellite markers based on coupling multiplex microsatellite enrichment and Next-Generation Sequencing on 454 GS-FLX Titanium platforms. The procedure was calibrated on a model species (Apis mellifera) and validated on 13 other species from various taxonomic groups (animals, plants, fungi), including taxa for which severe difficulties were previously encountered using traditional methods. We obtained from 11,497 to 34,483 sequences depending on the species and the number of detected microsatellite loci ranged from 199 to 5,791. We thus demonstrated that this procedure can be readily and successfully applied to a large variety of taxonomic groups, at...