MICRO-CHECKER: Software for identifying and correcting genotyping errors in microsatellite data

Abstract

DNA degradation, low DNA concentrations and primer-site mutations may result in the incorrect assignment of microsatellite genotypes, potentially biasing population genetic analyses. MICRO-CHECKER is WINDOWS®-based software that tests the genotyping of microsatellites from diploid populations. The program aids identification of genotyping errors due to nonamplified alleles (null alleles), short allele dominance (large allele dropout) and the scoring of stutter peaks, and also detects typographic errors. MICRO-CHECKER estimates the frequency of null alleles and, importantly, can adjust the allele and genotype frequencies of the amplified alleles, permitting their use in further population genetic analysis. MICRO-CHECKER can be freely downloaded from http://www.microchecker.hull.ac.uk/.