Characterization of dinucleotide microsatellite loci and confirmation of sexing primers for the bush dog (Speothos venaticus)

Bush dogs (Speothos venaticus) are small, threatened canids from Central and South America. The ability to conduct population-level studies using noninvasive genetic samples would provide important information on this poorly understood species. We characterized eight dinucleotide microsatellite loci using samples from 15 captive bush dogs. Allelic diversity ranged from 2 to 5 alleles per locus, and observed heterozygosity ranged from 0.267 to 0.933. All loci were in Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium and no evidence of genotypic linkage disequilibrium was found. We determined that DBX6 and DBY7, two canid-specific molecular sexing primers, accurately indicate the sex of individual bush dog samples.