Figure 2.

Amplification success for conserved microsatellite loci and primer sets across the major Charadriiformes lineages. Conserved microsatellite loci are those loci for which both flanking regions could be located to a homologue in the chicken genome. Anonymous sequences lacked matching flanks. Each lineage of Charadriiformes was represented by one species: Kentish plover for Charadri, whiskered auklet for Lari and ruff for Scolopaci. (a) Amplification success for standard primers compared between conserved microsatellite loci and anonymous microsatellite loci. (b) Amplification success of consensus versus standard primers for conserved loci for which both types of primer were designed. Consensus primers were designed after alignment of chicken and charadriiform sequence and placed into highly preserved flanking regions between chicken and shorebird. Standard primers were designed using the shorebird sequence only, without comparison to the chicken sequence homologue. Numbers at the bottom refer to (a) the number of microsatellite loci and (b) the number of primers that were tested in each group.