Frequency and Distribution of Microsatellites in the Genome of Filamentous Fungus, Neurospora crassa

A total of 38.0 Mb of publicly available DNA sequence in Neurospora crassa was researched for mono-to hexanucleotide simple sequence repeats (SSR or microsatellite) to determine the type, size and frequency. A total of 14 788 SSRs were observed in the whole genomic DNA sequence, about one every 2.57 kb, with the criteria of SSR length ＞15 bp and 80% matches. The most abundant microsatellite was trinucleotide repeat, the number was 4729, followed by hexanucleotide and mononucleotide repeats, the numbers were 2 940 and 2 489 respectively, and the least abundance was dinucleotide repeat, only 691 were found. Among the 10082 ORFs, 4094 SSRs were harbored in 2373 ORF (no intron) of the organism. One thousand and fifty six ORFs harbored only one SSR. Similar with other organisms, tri- and hexanucleotide repeats were predominant in ORFs, 54.1 and 48.8% of tri-and hexanucleotide repeats were distributed in ORF region. The density of these two motifs was overpresented in coding regions, because ORF region and coding region constitutes only 46 and 38.3% of genomic sequence, respectively. Upstream and downstream 300 bp of regulatory regions were high density regions of SSRs, particularly density of pentanucleotide SSR in upstream region was as high as five times of average density in genomic DNA, density of di-and tetranucleotide SSR was also more than two times of average density. The density of penta-, tetra-, di-and mononucleotide SSRs was relatively higher than average density. There were 47 SSRs in mitochondria 64 840 bp DNA sequence, their distribution is similar with genomic DNA sequence. These results suggested that SSRs were clustered in regulatory regions of genomic DNA.