title: Simple sequence repeat marker development from bacterial artificial chromosome end sequences and expressed sequence tags of flax (Linum usitatissimum L.).
abstract: Flax is an important oilseed crop in North America and is mostly grown as a fibre crop in Europe. As a self-pollinated diploid with a small estimated genome size of ~370 Mb, flax is well suited for fast progress in genomics. In the last few years, important genetic resources have been developed for this crop. Here, we describe the assessment and comparative analyses of 1,506 putative simple sequence repeats (SSRs) of which, 1,164 were derived from BAC-end sequences (BESs) and 342 from expressed sequence tags (ESTs). The SSRs were assessed on a panel of 16 flax accessions with 673 (58 %) and 145 (42 %) primer pairs being polymorphic in the BESs and ESTs, respectively. With 818 novel polymorphic SSR primer pairs reported in this study, the repertoire of available SSRs in flax has more than doubled from the combined total of 508 of all previous reports. Among nucleotide motifs, trinucleotides were the most abundant irrespective of the class, but dinucleotides were the most polymorphic. SSR length was also positively correlated with polymorphism. Two dinucleotide (AT/TA and AG/GA) and two trinucleotide (AAT/ATA/TAA and GAA/AGA/AAG) motifs and their iterations, different from those reported in many other crops, accounted for more than half of all the SSRs and were also more polymorphic (63.4 %) than the rest of the markers (42.7 %). This improved resource promises to be useful in genetic, quantitative trait loci (QTL) and association mapping as well as for anchoring the physical/genetic map with the whole genome shotgun reference sequence of flax.
authors.affiliation: Cereal Research Centre, Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, 195 Dafoe Road, Winnipeg, MB, R3T 2M9, Canada. sylvie.j.cloutier@agr.gc.ca
authors.forename: Sylvie
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Cloutier
authors.forename: Evelyn
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Miranda
authors.forename: Kerry
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Ward
authors.forename: Natasa
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Radovanovic
authors.forename: Elsa
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Reimer
authors.forename: Andrzej
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Walichnowski
authors.forename: Raju
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Datla
authors.forename: Gordon
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Rowland
authors.forename: Scott
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Duguid
authors.forename: Raja
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Ragupathy
mesh_terms: D001483:Base Sequence; D022202:Chromosomes, Artificial, Bacterial / Q000235:genetics*; D020224:Expressed Sequence Tags; D019597:Flax / Q000235:genetics*; D005819:Genetic Markers; D005821:Genetic Techniques; D005838:Genotype; D018895:Microsatellite Repeats / Q000235:genetics*; D059372:Nucleotide Motifs / Q000235:genetics; D009711:Nucleotides / Q000235:genetics
chemical_list: D005819:Genetic Markers; D009711:Nucleotides