Abstract

The Loxechinus albus is the only sea urchin exploited for commercial fisheries and is an important component of communities across southeastern Pacific coast. Despite its ecological and economic importance, limited information is known about genetic diversity and the actual connectivity among their populations. From 43,608 contigs obtained from their transcriptome we identified in silico a total of 463 putative microsatellite loci. From here, 17 expressed sequence tag-derived simple sequence repeats were developed. The number of alleles per locus ranged from 1 to 18 and no significant linkage disequilibrium was detected between locus pairs. Deviations for Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium were observed only in 6 of 17 loci in one location. These new markers will be useful to assess the levels of genetic connectivity among populations.