Evaluation of cleaved amplified polymorphic sequence markers for <Emphasis Type="Italic">Chamaecyparis obtusa</Emphasis> based on expressed sequence tag information from <Emphasis Type="Italic">Cryptomeria japonica</Emphasis>

We have developed and evaluated sequence-tagged site (STS) primers based on expressed sequence-tag information derived from sugi (Cryptomeria japonica) for use in hinoki (Chamaecyparis obtusa), a species that belongs to a different family (although it appears to be fairly closely related to sugi). Of the 417 C. japonica STS primer pairs we screened, 120 (~30%) were transferable and provided specific PCR amplification products from 16 C. obtusa plus trees. We used haploid megagametophytes to investigate the homology of 80 STS fragments between C. obtusa and C. japonica and to identify orthologous loci. Nearly 90% of the fragments showed high (>70%) degrees of similarity between the species, and 35 STSs indicated homology to entries with the same putative function in a public DNA database. Of the 120 STS fragments amplified, 72 showed restriction fragment length polymorphisms; in addition, the CC2430 primers detected amplicon length polymorphism. We assessed the inheritance pattern of 27 cleaved amplified polymorphic sequence markers, using 20 individuals from the segregation population. All the markers analyzed were consistent with the marker inheritance patterns obtained from the screening panel, and no markers (except CC2716) showed significant (P<0.01) deviation from the expected segregation ratio. In total, 136 polymorphic markers were developed using C. japonica-based STS primers without any sequence modification. In addition, the applicability of STS-based markers developed in one species to other species was found to closely reflect the evolutionary distance between the species, which is roughly concordant with the difference between their rbcL sequences. We plan to use these markers for genetic studies in C. obtusa. Most of the markers should also provide reliable anchor loci for comparative mapping studies of the C. obtusa and C. japonica genomes.