Development of novel microsatellite markers for effective applications in Anthurium cultivar identification

Anthurium andraeanum is one of the most economically important floral crops and potted flowers marketed worldwide. Microsatellite markers are currently the preferred molecular marker owing to the many desirable attributes, including hypervariability, codominance, and amenability to high-throughput genotyping; however, there are few polymorphic molecular markers available for Anthurium. The object of this study was to develop and characterize novel microsatellite markers using the Araceae sequences in GenBank of the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) to contribute to molecular identification for cultivar protection. Using 1,579 Araceae expressed sequence tags (ESTs) and the related nucleotide sequences, 100 candidates contained simple sequence repeat (SSR) motifs that were suitable for primer design. Furthermore, 100 pairs of SSR primers were screened against a set of 28 diverse genotypes representing 24 cultivars that included four registration cultivars which were bred from the Taiwan Agricultural Research Institute (TARI) and 20 commercial cultivars, appended with three hybrid progeny and a mutant line. From the selected six polymorphic SSR loci, 52 alleles were amplified and 27 distinct genotypes were found, except for 'Tropical' and its mutant, with a mean number of eight alleles per locus. The polymorphism information content (PIC) ranged from 0.86 to 0.93. Based on these results, we proposed a key identification set using four microsatellite markers that is sufficient to discriminate among 24 cultivars. Because the Anthurium microsatellite markers developed in this study are primarily from expressed sequence tags or related genomic sequences, they can be used for cultivar identification and, accordingly, contribute to genetic evaluations in breeding programs.