Development of a highly polymorphic chloroplast SSR set in with transferability to other conifer species-A promising toolkit for gene flow investigations.

The genus is widely distributed across the world and is of high importance for forestry. Since chloroplasts are usually uniparentally inherited, they are an important tool for specific scientific issues like gene flow, parentage, migration and, in general, evolutionary analysis. Established genetic markers for organelles in conifers are rather limited to RFLP markers, which are more labour and time intensive, compared with SSR markers. Using QUIAGEN CLC Workbench 23.03, we aligned two chloroplast genomes from different species (NCBI accessions: NC_039581, NC_042778, NC_039582, NC_042410, NC_035067, NC_062889, NC_042775, NC_057314, NC_041464, MH706706, MH047653 and MH510244) to identify potential SSR candidates. Further selection and development of forward and reverse primers was performed using the NCBI Primer Blast Server application. In this article, we introduce a remarkably polymorphic SSR marker set for various species, which can be useful for other conifer genera, such as C, , or . In total, 17 cpSSRs showed reliable amplification and polymorphisms in with a total of 68 haplotypes detected. All 17 cpSSRs amplified in the tested spp. In the other tested species, except for , at least one primer was polymorphic.