Development of microsatellite markers in the beauty rat snake Elaphe taeniura (Colubridae)

Abstract

The beauty rat snake Elaphe taeniura is an oviparous colubrid snake, the distributional range of which covers most provinces of China (including Taiwan and Hainan), India, Indochina, and the northern half of Malay Peninsula. The snake is listed on the “Lists of terrestrial wildlife under state protection, which are beneficial or of important economic or scientific value” promulgated by China’s State Forestry Administration in 2000. To develop some more effective conservation strategies for the snake, we need a better understanding of population structure and evolutionary history of this species through kinds of specific molecular markers such as microsatellites or short, tandemly repeated base-pair sequences. Here, we characterize 11 polymorphic microsatellite loci isolated from E. taeniura genomic libraries. Forty-eight individuals were collected from Quanzhou population in Guangxi, China. These markers revealed a high degree of genetic diversity (5–19 alleles per locus) and heterozygosity (H _O ranged from 0.121 to 0.875, and H _E ranged from 0.276 to 0.922). No locus exhibited significant deviations from Hardy–Weinberg equilibrium. There was no evidence of linkage disequilibrium among pairs of loci. These microsatellite markers will be useful for future study of population structure and evolutionary history of E. taeniura.