Genome-wide analysis of microsatellite polymorphism in chicken circumventing the ascertainment bias

The whole-genome shotgun sequence data from three unrelated chicken individuals was used to get a clear idea about microsatellite variability in a vertebrate genome by circumventing the ascertainment bias related with inferring evolutionary process in microsatellite. It is suggested from the negative relationship between microsatellite abundance and single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) density that a balance between rate of replication slippage and rate of point mutation regulates equilibrium microsatellite distributions.