Microsatellites or simple sequence repeats (SSRs) are tandem repeats of DNA of 1-6 bp long. They ubiquitously occur in both eukaryotic and prokaryotic genomes. Because of their abundance,
they have widespread applications in both animal and plant sciences; such as varietal identification, genetic mapping, QTL mapping, phylogenetic and diversity studies. Thus, SSRs have become valuable DNA markers for molecular biologists and geneticists. Microsatellites are markers
of choice for many molecular geneticists because of their hypervariability, codominant
inheritance, multi-allelism and PCR-based assaying of variations that are amenable to automation and high throughput assay. However, the utilization of microsatellite markers in the past was
hampered by its laborious de novo isolations and species-specific nature.