Development of EST-SSR markers and genetic diversity analysis among three Artemia species from different geographic populations

Artemia is one of the most important live food items used in larviculture. In order to study the genetic diversity of Artemia in China, 170 novel simple sequence repeats (SSR) markers were identified from expressed sequence tags (ESTs) of the transcriptome library of Artemia parthenogenetica. Of these, 8 microsatellite loci were developed to characterize three geographical populations of Artemia. The results showed the expected and observed heterozygosity varied from 0.43 to 0.50 and from 0.59 to 0.64, respectively. The PIC (polymorphic information content) ranged from 0.37 to 0.45. These observations indicated that the Yuncheng population has the highest genetic diversity, whereas the Shuanghu population has the lowest. The Fst value (genetic differentiation coefficient) indicated that the three populations are highly differentiated. Genetic identity analyses revealed that the Yuncheng and Shuanghu populations have the closest relationship. The SSR markers described here will serve as a valuable tool for further studies in population and conservation genetics on Artemia.