Isolation and characterization of eight polymorphic microsatellites markers for the earthworm Lumbricus terrestris

The earthworm Lumbricus terrestris, which is an ecologically important sentinel species for soils widely distributed throughout Northern Europe, has never been involved in deep population genetic studies. In order to promote future studies, we report here the isolation and characterization of 8 new polymorphic microsatellite loci isolated from sequencing of a microsatellite-enriched genomic library. Microsatellite markers were tested on 192 field collected individuals. Allelic richness per locus varied from 4.921 to 24.876, with a mean value of 6.125 alleles per locus. The observed heterozygosity (Ho) ranged from 0.132 to 0.839, whereas the expected heterozygosity (HE) ranged from 0.407 to 0.926. Developed markers should be helpful for accurate estimation of population structure, dispersal and gene flow among populations.