Identification Of A Heterozygous Microsatellite Marker In Pinus Pumila

Pinus pumila, which habits around the timber line in Japanese mountains, propagates from adventitious roots of creeping or belowground stems and from seeds that are dispersed by animals. In an attempt to detect heterozygous simple sequence repeat (SSR) alleles in the nuclear genome of P. pumila, which may be useful to identify individuals in natural populations, we performed PCR using the DNA from this species and primer sets that have been reported for P. strobus SSR (Echt et al. 1996). Aligned subclone sequences originating from RPS150 product suggested that this locus included at least two [ga(t/g)](n) alleles, [gat](3)[gag](3) and [gat](3)[gag](1)[gat](1), while the direct sequence of RPS160 product included a single SSR allele of [acag](3)[gcag](1)[acag](3). This is the first report of the heterozygous nuclear SSR locus in P. pumila.