Microsatellite variation and evolution in the Peromyscus maniculatus species group.

Variation at 12 pure-repeat dinucleotide microsatellites from Peromyscus maniculatus was analyzed for samples of all species in the P. maniculatus species group and P. leucopus. Except for one locus (Pml08) that amplified a product only for P. maniculatus, these microsatellites yielded reliable estimates of variation across these species; per-locus polymorphism and allele-size distribution were not significantly different among or between any of the species sampled from mainland populations. Significantly lower levels of variation and the distribution of alleles in the two populations of the insular-endemic P. sejugis were consistent with the expectation of substantial founder effect and suggest a lack of recent gene flow between these populations. Phenetic analyses of genetic distances based on shared allele frequencies uniformly produced well-supported trees that were entirely concordant with the a priori corroborated relationships within the P. maniculatus species group; this result was not obtained with analyses of a genetic distance computed from differences in allele sizes. The microsatellite data do not support the hypothesis that P. sejugis should be considered conspecific with P. maniculatus but yield a strongly supported sister-group association between P. sejugis and P. keeni.