Fuyu Li¹ , Dandan Chen² , Yuanchao Li² , Shiyao Li¹ , Jing Hou¹ , Daoru Wang² , Yan Wang¹

1 State Key Laboratory of Marine Resource Utilization in South China Sea, Hainan University, Haikou, Hainan, China
2 Hainan Academy of Ocean and Fisheries Sciences, Haikou, Hainan, China
Author    Correspondence author
International Journal of Marine Science, 2020, Vol. 10, No. 3   doi: 10.5376/ijms.2020.10.0003
Received: 12 May, 2020    Accepted: 12 May, 2020    Published: 12 May, 2020

This article was first published in Genomics and Applied Biology in Chinese, and here was authorized to translate and publish the paper in English under the terms of Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Li F.Y., Chen D.D., Li Y.C., Li S.Y., Hou J., Wang D.R., and Wang Y., 2020, Development of microsatellite markers for the hermatypic coral Porites lutea, International Journal of Marine Science, 10(3): 1-9 (doi: 10.5376/ijms.2020.10.0003)

By mining the EST and genomic microsatellite sequence resources of Porites species in GenBank, and using interspecific amplification and resequencing, we developed 20 microsatellite markers for the stony coral Porites lutea, meanwhile, validated and excluded 43 microsatellite markers of its symbiotic zooxanthella. These markers of P. lutea were genotyped in one wild population (n=16) from the southwest of Hainan Island fringing reefs. Nineteen of the 20 markers showed polymorphism. The number of alleles was 2~7 (mean 3.5±1.8), and the observed heterozygosity (H_o) and expected heterozygosity (H_e) were 0.06~0.94 (mean 0.34±0.29) and 0.18~0.83 (mean 0.57±0.20), respectively. Four markers remained deviated from the Hardy-Weinberg Equilibrium (HWE) after multiple comparison correction for Bonferroin (P_HWE < 0.05). This is the first set of microsatellite markers of P. lutea. They should be useful for the research on the genetic diversity and connectivity of this species and the conservation of endangered coral reef ecosystems and reef-building coral communities in the Indo-Pacific region.

Porites lutea; Stony coral; Microsatellite; Genetic connectivity; Symbiotic zooxanthellae