Development of Microsatellite Markers for the Hermatypic Coral Porites lutea

By mining the EST and genomic microsatellite sequence resources of Porites species in GenBank, and using interspecific amplification and resequencing, we developed 20 microsatellite markers for the stony coral Porites lutea, meanwhile, validated and excluded 43 microsatellite markers of its symbiotic zooxanthella. These markers of P. lutea were genotyped in one wild population (n=16) from the southwest of Hainan Island fringing reefs. Nineteen of the 20 markers showed polymorphism. The number of alleles was 2~7 (mean 3.5±1.8), and the observed heterozygosity (Ho) and expected heterozygosity (He) were 0.06~0.94 (mean 0.34±0.29) and 0.18~0.83 (mean 0.57±0.20), respectively. Four markers remained deviated from the Hardy-Weinberg Equilibrium (HWE) after multiple comparison correction for Bonferroin (PHWE<0.05). This is the first set of microsatellite markers of P. lutea. They should be useful for the research on the genetic diversity and connectivity of this species and the conservation of endangered coral reef ecosystems and reef-building coral communities in the Indo-Pacific region.