Abstract
Microsatellites, which involve a repetitive sequence motif (2-6bp), are evenly interspersed throughout eukaryotic genomes. Because of the variety in the numbers of repeat, they are useful genetic markers in the fields of human genetics, forensic sciences, and so on. Recently, phylogenetic studies using microsatellites have been performed in various species. Microsatellites in intergenic sequences, which evolve faster than coding sequences, are informative in the comparison between closely related species. Many of nonhuman primate species share the same microsatellite loci as human, although repeat numbers or nucleotide sequences vary species to species. We introduce some interesting studies and topics in which the interspecies difference of properties of microsatellites and the birth or death of them has been discussed. We also report the nucleotide sequence analysis of a microsatellite D14S299 locus in primates. The nucleotide sequence analyses of microsatellite alleles in primates provide informative data to study on primate evolution or dynamic processes in microsatellite loci.
