ISSR Techniques for Evolutionary Biology

Inter-simple sequence repeat (ISSR) markers were originally devised for differentiating among closely related plant cultivars but have become extremely useful for studies of natural populations of plants, fungi, insects, and vertebrates. The markers are easily generated using minimal equipment and are hypervariable, yielding a large amount of data for a reasonable cost to the researcher. The methods for Miniprep DNA extraction and cleanup, polymerase chain reaction (PCR) amplification, optimization, data gathering and scoring, and data analyses are outlined.