Development and characterization of 14 microsatellites for the eastern chipmunk, Tamias striatus.

The number of microsatellite markers currently available for the eastern chipmunk Tamias striatus provides limited capacity to achieve sufficient pedigree building for the study of their genetic structure and relatedness patterns. We developed microsatellite loci for the eastern chipmunk, a small rodent commonly found in eastern North America. More specifically, we report data for 14 loci and 50 individuals genotyped from a population in southern Québec, Canada. We found a number of alleles ranging from 5 to 21 and there was no linkage disequilibrium among locus. One locus deviated from Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium and had a high proportion of null alleles. Those loci will be used in addition to previously developed loci to improve the precision of parentage assignment and population genetics studies on this species.