Development and transportability across Prunus species of 42 polymorphic almond microsatellites

We report 47 new simple sequence repeats (SSRs) obtained from a CT/AG enriched genomic library of almond cv. Texas (syn. Mission). Forty-two of them were polymorphic in a sample of eight almond cultivars and 31 of these were single-locus. The average values of the number of alleles per locus (6.6), and mean observed (65%) and expected (76%0) heterozygosities for these 31 SSRs indicated a high level of variability. All cultivars studied could be individually identified using any one of the five SSRs. Transportability to other Prunus species (peach, sweet cherry, Japanese plum and apricot) was also high (83-100%).