ral ssBioMed CentBMC Plant Biology Open AcceResearch article Utility of EST-derived SSR in cultivated peanut (Arachis hypogaea

Background: Lack of sufficient molecular markers hinders current genetic research in peanuts (Arachis hypogaea L.). It is necessary to develop more molecular markers for potential use in peanut genetic research. With the development of peanut EST projects, a vast amount of available EST sequence data has been generated. These data offered an opportunity to identify SSR in ESTs by data mining. Results: In this study, we investigated 24,238 ESTs for the identification and development of SSR markers. In total, 881 SSRs were identified from 780 SSR-containing unique ESTs. On an average, one SSR was found per 7.3 kb of EST sequence with tri-nucleotide motifs (63.9%) being the most abundant followed by di-(32.7%), tetra- (1.7%), hexa- (1.0%) and penta-nucleotide (0.7%) repeat types. The top six motifs include