Development of SNP markers associated with defense mechanism of sea cucumber, Apostichopus japonicas

Tewenty six Single nucleotide polymorphism (SNPs) markers were developed of sea cucumber (Apostichopus japonicas) by the high resolution melting assays. All loci were involved in defense mechanism. The results of genotyping revealed that all loci had two alleles and the minor allele frequency ranged from 0.038 to 0.500. The observed and expected heterozygosity ranged from 0.054-0.792 to 0.064-0.547, respectively. Two loci significantly depart from Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium and no significant linkage disequilibrium was detected. As far as we know, this is the first report about defense mechanism of sea cucumber at molecular level. These SNP markers should be useful for the construction of genetic linkage map and comparative genome analysis in A. japonicus.