Evolution of hypervariable microsatellites in apomictic polyploid lineages of Ranunculus carpaticola: directional bias at dinucleotide loci.

ABSTRACT: Microsatellites are widely used in genetic and evolutionary analyses, but their own evolution is far from simple. The mechanisms maintaining the mutational patterns of simple repeats and the typical stable allele-frequency distributions are still poorly understood. Asexual lineages may provide particularly informative models for the indirect study of microsatellite evolution, because their genomes act as complete linkage groups, with mutations being the only source of genetic variation. Here, we study the direction of accumulated dinucleotide microsatellite mutations in wild asexual lineages of hexaploid Ranunculus carpaticola. Whereas the overall number of contractions is not significantly different from that of expansions, the within-locus frequency of contractions, but not of expansions

SUBMITTER: Paun O 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC1569770 | biostudies-literature | 2006 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature