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Journal of Heredity Advance Access published online on May 22, 2008
Journal of Heredity, doi:10.1093/jhered/esn036
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© The American Genetic Association. 2008. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org.

The First Sex-Specific Molecular Marker for Mosses Discovered in Pseudocalliergon trifarium

Helena Korpelainen, Irene Bisang, Lars Hedenäs, and Johanna Kolehmainen

From the Department of Applied Biology, University of Helsinki, PO Box 27, FI-00014 Helsinki, Finland (Korpelainen and Kolehmainen); and the Swedish Museum of Natural History, Department of Cryptogamic Botany, Box 50007, SE-104 05 Stockholm, Sweden (Bisang and Hedenäs)

Address correspondence to H. Korpelainen at the address above, or e-mail: helena.korpelainen{at}helsinki.fi.

Most dioecious plants do not exhibit discernible sexual dimorphism before sexual maturity. Therefore, it is impossible to address any sex-related questions during the prereproductive phase unless a genetic sex marker is available for gender determination. The aim of the present study was to develop a genetic sex marker for the moss Pseudocalliergon trifarium to allow gender and sex ratio determination at any stage in the life cycle. A high proportion of P. trifarium populations do not express sex. The screening of genomic DNA with inter simple sequence repeat (ISSR) primers was used to discover sex-specific polymerase chain reaction (PCR) amplification products. A presumably female-specific band was found, excised from the gel, cloned, and sequenced. A sequence-walking method was used to characterize the same region in males. A primer pair was designed to allow the amplification of a 159-bp portion of the female-specific DNA region. All tested material, up to 16-year-old herbarium specimens, provided unambiguous amplification products. This study successfully provides, for the first time in a moss, a sex-specific DNA marker. It allows reliable determination of gender and sex ratios. The short length of the amplification product is an advantage as satisfactory PCR products are more likely when the targeted sequence is short. The amount of variation in the DNA region shared by both sexes was relatively high. If the male sequence can be better characterized, the sex-specific regions could possibly be used to evaluate sex-specific phylogeographic patterns.

Corresponding Editor: Brian Murray

Received February 4, 2008
Accepted April 14, 2008


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