| The Lobelia (Campanulaceae), a cosmopolitan genus, contains 380 species. Most of the species distributed in tropical or subtropical regions. The giant lobelia is a special group, which grows mostly in afro-alpine regions and found in moist areas such as valley bottoms and moorland. There are 21 species of giant lobelia. It is the representative plant of the east Africa plateau. Because of the environment degradation and the increase of human activities, the survival condition is not optimistic. The conservation genetics study of giant lobelia is still limited. In order to develop co-dominant microsatellite molecular markers (SSRs) for studying conservation genetics of the giant lobelias endemic to east Africa, we deep sequenced the genome of the giant lobelia, Lobelia deckenii, using the next-generation high-throughput sequencing technology. Using the program MISA, we sought out a total of 58,966 SSRs, from which we designed a total of 3,558 SSR primer pairs using the program Primer. We selected 40 primer pairs at random to evaluate their application and polymorphism across six individuals from three populations (two individuals per population) of L. deckenii. In final,14 markers were amplified successfully, yielding clear and discernible bands, and were found to be polymorphic. Using these 14 SSR markers, we studied the genetic variation of 24 individuals from Mountain Kenya population. We detected a total of 83 alleles. The number of alleles per locus ranged from 4 to 9. Observed heterozygosity (Ho) and expected value (He) per locus varied from 0.000 to 1.000 and 0.625 to 0.854, respectively. Our results indicated that development of SSR markers from the genome data by high-throughput sequencing in giant lobelia is valuable and effective. These newly generated SSR markers will provide new tools for studying genetic diversity and population genetic structure and conservation biology of the Giant lobelias in East Africa. |
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