Characterization of microsatellite markers covering chromosome 1 in the Korean and Japanese populations / 대한치과교정학회지

ABSTRACT

Microsatellite markers are considered to be very promising genetic markers for genetic linkage analysis. The majority of the markers are as informative as in Caucasians but there are significant ethnic differences in the genetic variations. In order to investigate the genetic variations in the Korean and Japanese populations and their ethnic differences, 51 microsatellite marker loci spanning the whole human chromosome 1 were arranged from a commercially available set (ABI PRISM Linkage Mapping Set-HD5, Applied Biosystems, Foster City, CA, USA), and then determined the allelic frequencies and heterozygosities for these marker loci in the 96 unrelated Korean subjects and 96 unrelated Japanese subjects. Of all 51 markers tested, significant differences were observed when microsatellite allele frequency pattern of Korean was compared with those of Caucasian, while this pattern was highly similar between Korean and Japanese populations. Our data indicate that an extensive verification of public microsatellite markers in a particular population study should be undertaken prior to their linkage studies. Moreover, this information should facilitate genetic linkage studies of various hereditary diseases, especially in the Koreans and Japanese.