Abstract:
Degradation reduces DNA quality and quantity in faecal samples and leads to low amplification success. We investigated the influence of repeat motif and amplicon length by comparing the amplification success of five dinucleotide, five tetranucleotide, and two compound microsatellite markers for African elephant (Loxodonta africana) faecal DNA samples. We found that both repeat motif and amplicon length influenced amplification success, and suggest the use of simple microsatellite markers containing alleles with small amplicon sizes to maximise amplification success of degraded DNA.
