Development and characterization of 13 polymorphic microsatellite markers for the Chinese surf clam (Mactra chinensis) through Illumina paired-end sequencing

Chinese surf clam (Mactra chinensis) is a commercially important bivalve in China. The high-throughout transcriptome sequencing of M. chinensis provided a valuable resource for mining large number of microsatellite markers. In this study, we developed and characterized 13 novel polymorphic microsatellite markers for M. chinensis. The number of alleles varied from 4 to 7, with an average of 5.2 per locus. The observed and expected heterozygosity ranged from 0.1667 to 0.7368 and 0.6434 to 0.8056, respectively. Two loci significantly deviated from Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium after Bonferroni correction. These novel informative microsatellite markers will be useful for further genetic diversity analysis, linkage mapping, evolutionary studies and marker-assisted breeding.