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MBE Advance Access published online on May 30, 2003
Molecular Biology and Evolution, doi:10.1093/molbev/msg137
Molecular Biology and Evolution © Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution 2003; all rights reserved
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Accepted March 31, 2003
© 2003 Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution

Original Articles

Rapid Divergence of Microsatellite Abundance among Species of Drosophila

Charles L. Ross 1*, Kelly A. Dyer 1, Tamar Erez 1, Susan J. Miller 2, John Jaenike 1, Therese A. Markow 1

1 Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona 85721
2 BioComputing Facility, Arizona Research Labs, University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona 85721

* To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: clross{at}email.arizona.edu.


  Abstract

Among major taxonomic groups, microsatellites exhibit considerable variation in composition and allele length, but they also show considerable conservation within many major groups. This variation may be explained by slow microsatellite evolution so that all species within a group have similar patterns of variation, or by taxon-specific mutational or selective constraints. Unfortunately, comparing microsatellites across species and studies can be problematic due to biases that may exist among different isolation and analysis protocols. We present microsatellite data from five Drosophila species in the Drosophila subgenus: D. arizonae, D. mojavensis, and D. pachea (three cactophilic species), and D. neotestacea and D. recens (two mycophagous species), all isolated at the same time using identical protocols. For each species, we compared the relative abundance of motifs, the distribution of repeat size, and the average number of repeats. Dimers were the most abundant microsatellites for each species. However, we found considerable variation in the relative abundance of motif size classes among species, even between sister taxa. Frequency differences among motifs within size classes for the three cactophilic species, but not the two mycophagous species, are consistent with other studied Drosophila. Frequency distributions of repeat number as well as mean size show significant differences among motif size classes but not across species. Sizes of microsatellites in these five species are consistent with D. virilis, another species in the subgenus Drosophila, but they have consistently higher means than in D. melanogaster, in the subgenus Sophophora. These results confirm that many aspects of microsatellite variation evolve quickly but also are subject to taxon-specific constraints. Additionally, the nature of microsatellite evolution is dependent on temporal and taxonomic scales, and some variation is conserved across broad taxonomic levels despite relatively high rates of mutation for these loci.

Key Words: microsatellite evolution, Drosophila, D. mojavensis, D. arizonae, D. pachea, D. neotestacea, D. recens


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