Why use microsatellites rathers than SNPs?
SNPs are great genetic markers but because of their low heterozygosity (the likelihood that a marker in any individual will appear heterozygous) you need to type lots of them. Microsatellites are good markers for studies of genetic linkage because they have a high heterozygosity. They are highly mutable markers with often 15 or more alleles in any given population. This means that allelic identity-by-descent can be readily established (unlike with bi-allelic SNPs) and linkage determined. However, the mutability of microsatellites can also prove problematic. Occasionally alleles can be seen to mutate within a generation giving rise to apparently non – Mendelian inheritance. This mutability becomes more of a problem when considering allelic associations within populations and it has been argued that SNPs offer a better chance of identifying marker-marker or marker-phenotype LD.
Related Questions
- Every time I search for STS markers in dbSNP, dbSNP returns a screen that says that no SNPs were found in my region of interest. What am I doing wrong?
- How I match SNP names from the Seattle SNPs database (e.g. a Seattle SNPs named UI1498 in the IL10 gene) to dbSNP rs numbers in dbSNP?
- Why use microsatellites rathers than SNPs?
