Isolation and characterization of microsatellite loci for the Asian longhorned beetle, Anoplophora glabripennis.

We describe the first isolation of SSR (simple sequence repeat) markers for Anoplophora glabripennis, a pest of forests in China and urban trees in the USA. Ten markers were developed using FIASCO (fast isolation by AFLP of sequences containing repeats) with an (AC)(17) probe, and five markers were identified in expressed sequence tags found on the NCBI database. Twenty-seven beetles from a population in Gansu Province, China, were assayed.

Challenges of detecting directional selection after a bottleneck: lessons from Sorghum bicolor.

Multilocus surveys of sequence variation can be used to identify targets of directional selection, which are expected to have reduced levels of variation. Following a population bottleneck, the signal of directional selection may be hard to detect because many loci may have low variation by chance and the frequency spectrum of variation may be perturbed in ways that resemble the effects of selection. Cultivated Sorghum bicolor contains a subset of the genetic diversity found in its wild ancestor(s) due to the combined effects of a domestication bottleneck and human selection on traits associated with agriculture.

Equilibrium processes cannot explain high levels of short- and medium-range linkage disequilibrium in the domesticated grass Sorghum bicolor.

Patterns of linkage disequilibrium (LD) are of interest because they provide evidence of both equilibrium (e.g., mating system or long-term population structure) and nonequilibrium (e.

MITE display.

Genome size differences among crop plants are largely due to unequal accumulation of repetitive DNA sequences, mainly transposable elements (TEs). Over the past decade, many families of miniature inverted-repeat transposable elements (MITEs) have been identified and characterized in a variety of organisms including animals and plants. MITEs are characterized by short terminal inverted repeats (TIRs) (10-15 bp), small size (approx 100 to 500 bp), high-copy-number (approx 1000 to 15,000 per haploid genome), and a preference for insertion into 2-bp to 3-bp targets that are rich in A and T residues.