Structural and functional particularities of microsatellites in cattle and sheep genomes

A comparative analysis of polymorphism of DNA fragments flanked by microsatellite loci of cattle and sheep is performed. In all, 102 loci revealed in the polymerase chain reaction with the use of fragments of di- and trinucleotide microsatellite fragments as primers are analyzed. It is found that polymorphism of the spectra of amplification products depends substantially on the nucleotide sequence of the primer. The dependence of polymorphism of DNA fragments on the structural and functional organization of their flanks is discussed.