Development of trinucleotide (GGC)n SSR markers in peanut (Arachis hypogaea L.) 

Mei Yuan¹ · Limin Gong² · Ronghua Meng³ · Shuangling Li¹ · Phat Dang⁴ · Baozhu Guo⁵ · Guohao He*² 

¹Shandong Peanut Research Institute, Qingdao, China
²Department of Agricultural Sciences, College of Agricultural, Environmental and Natural Sciences, Tuskegee University, Tuskegee, AL, USA
³Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania, PA, USA
⁴USDA-ARS, National Peanut Research Laboratory, Dawson, GA, USA
⁵USDA-ARS, Crop Genetics and Breeding Research Unit, Tifton, GA, USA

*Corresponding author: hguohao@tuskegee.edu

Financial support: This work was supported by a grant from the National High Technology Research and Development Program of China (No. 2006AA100106) and partly supported by USDA/CSREES/CBG (No. 00-38814-9541).

Keywords: cultivated peanut, microsatellites, polymorphism, simple sequence repeat.

Cultivated peanut (Arachis hypogaea L.) is an oilseed crop of economic importance. It is native to South America, and it is grown extensively in the semi-arid tropics of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Given an extremely narrow genetic base, efforts are being made to develop simple sequence repeat (SSR) markers to provide useful genetic and genomic tools for the peanut research community. A SSR-enriched library to isolate trinucleotide (GGC)n SSRs in peanut was constructed. A total of 143 unique sequences containing (GGC)n repeats were identified. One hundred thirty eight primer pairs were successfully designed at the flanking regions of SSRs. A suitable polymerase was chosen to amplify these GC-rich sequences. Although a low level of polymorphism was observed in cultivated peanut by these new developed SSRs, a high level of transferability to wild species would be beneficial to increasing the number of SSRs in wild species.