Relative abundances, isolation and structure of phlebotomine microsatellites

Popular classes of microsatellites are not always abundant in insects or ea sily isolated from them. Dot-blot hybridizations demonstrated much variatio n in the relative abundance of four repeal: classes in four phlebotomine sa ndfly species. Only AAT-class repeats were specifically isolated from a pha gemid library of Lutzomyia whitmani, even though other microsatellites had similar abundances. An enrichment step would have targeted classes but was omitted because relatively long flanking sequences were sought. All fourtee n sandfly loci had a non-coding structure, and a minority of dipteran AAT-c lass repeats found in DNA databases and the literature were from exons, The refore, this class should often provide neutral alleles for population stud ies. Perfect, not imperfect, AAT-class repeats were polymorphic in wild L. whitmani.