Date of Award
2015
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Bachelors
Department
Natural Sciences
First Advisor
Saarinen, Erin
Keywords
Dakota Skipper, Hesperia dacotae, Endangered Species, Genetics
Area of Concentration
Biology
Abstract
The Dakota skipper (Hesperia dacotae) is a tall grass prairie obligate. Since the colonization of Europeans in North America, 99% of its tall grass prairie habitat has been destroyed. As a result, abundance of the rare butterfly is declining. The advent of next-generation sequencing has made available large amounts of low-cost molecular data that can be applied to studying the genetics of endangered populations as indicators of threat levels and to better inform wildlife management. A popular marker for such studies are microsatellites necessitating primers for PCR amplification of these loci. This project investigates the capabilities and optimization of QDD, a Perl script pipeline program for microsatellite discovery and primer design, on a set of 4,000,000 Illumina reads from the Dakota skipper genome. From the primers QDD designed, I selected four primers that target microsatellite loci that are known to be polymorphic, and ten primers that target microsatellite loci that are likely to be polymorphic.
Recommended Citation
Guatney, Lucia, "BIOINFORMATIC APPROACHES TO MICROSATELLITE DISCOVERY AND PRIMER DESIGN IN THE DAKOTA SKIPPER (Hesperia dacotae) GENOME" (2015). Theses & ETDs. 5036.
https://digitalcommons.ncf.edu/theses_etds/5036