MitoSatPlant: mitochondrial microsatellites database of viridiplantae.

Microsatellites also known as simple sequence repeats (SSRs) consist of 1-6 nucleotide long repeating units. The importance of mitochondrial SSRs (mtSSRs) in fields like population genetics, plant phylogenetics and genome mapping motivated us to develop MitoSatPlant, a repository of plant mtSSRs. It contains information for perfect, imperfect and compound SSRs mined from 92 mitochondrial genomes of green plants, available at NCBI (as of 1 Feb 2014). A total of 72,798 SSRs were found, of which PCR primers were designed for 72,495 SSRs. Among all sequences, tetranucleotide repeats (26,802) were found to be most abundant whereas hexanucleotide repeats (2751) were detected with least frequency. MitoSatPlant was developed using SQL server 2008 and can be accessed through a front end designed in ASP.Net. It is an easy to use, user-friendly database and will prove to be a useful resource for plant scientists. To the best of our knowledge MitoSatPlant is the only database available for plant mtSSRs and can be freely accessed at http://compubio.in/mitosatplant/.