Development and characterization of novel polymorphic microsatellite markers for the Korean freshwater snail Semisulcospira coreana and cross-species amplification using next-generation sequencing

Korean freshwater snails of the genus Semisulcospira are widely distributed across East Asia. It has been a very popular nutritional food in Korea, and is an ecologically important water quality indicator because it lives only in clean water. However, no microsatellite markers have been generated to study the population genetic diversity of this genus. In the present study, we developed and characterized 18 novel microsatellite loci from Semisulcospira coreana genomic DNA. The microsatellites were isolated using 454 GS-FLX titanium sequencing and 18 markers were used for genotyping in S. coreana. In addition, we also tested the cross-species transferability of the microsatellite markers in four additional Semisulcospira spp. We identified 18 polymorphic loci and the number of alleles per loci, and their polymorphism information content values ranged from 2 to 17 and 0.203 to 0.902, respectively. The observed and expected heterozygosities of the loci ranged from 0.063 to 0.924 and 0.226 to 0.924, respectively. According to the analysis of the cross-species transferability of these markers, four species, S. forticosta, S. gottschei, S. tegulata, and S. libertina, showed a very high transferability (80%–85%). These results show that this set of nuclear markers could be useful for population genetics studies of this species and closely related species.