Identification of EST–SSRs and molecular diversity analysis in Mentha piperita

EST sequences of Mentha piperita available in the public domain (NCBI) were exploited to develop SSR markers. A total of 1316 ESTs were assembled into 155 contigs and 653 singletons and of these, 110 sequences were found to contain 130 SSRs, with a frequency of 1 SSR/3.4 kb. Dinucleotide repeat SSRs were most frequent (72.3%) with the AG/CT (43.8%) repeat motif followed by AT/AT (16.2%). Primer…