A cost-and-time effective procedure to develop SNP markers for multiple species: a support for community genetics

1.Multi‐species population genetics is an emerging field that provides insight relevant to conservation biology and community ecology. However, to date, this approach is limited to species with available genetic resources. The use of thousands of single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) markers developed from recent genotyping‐by‐sequencing (GBS) technologies is a roadmap for the study of non‐model species, but remains cost prohibitive when several, distantly related species are involved.

2.We aimed to overcome this issue by using a single HiSeq3000 run of restriction‐site associated DNA sequencing (RAD‐Seq) to retrieve SNP markers for 40 diverse species including plants, invertebrates, fish and mammals. We developed a Python‐based pipeline to isolate ~100‐500 high‐quality SNP markers for each species that could be genotyped through classical PCR amplification methods. To assess the quality of these markers, we validated our approach on ~160 of the characterized SNPs for each of 18 Neotr...