Isolation and characterization of novel microsatellite markers from the Australian water skink Eulamprus kosciuskoi and cross-species amplification in other members of the species-group

A panel of six samples from three Eulamprus species was used to screen 24 primer pairs developed from the Australian water skink Eulamprus kosciuskoi. We provide details of 10 microsatellite loci that exhibited the cleanest and strongest banding patterns. We also screened six of these microsatellite loci against 118 individuals from a population of E. heatwolei. These microsatellites exhibited large numbers of alleles per locus (4-19) and high heterozygosity (0.271-0.898) in this population. This suggests that they will be extremely useful for investigating mating systems and other facets of population biology in these lizards