Dominant (binary) molecular markers and their use in population and systematic biology

Abstract

Dominant (binary) markers (mainly AFLP, RAPD, ISSRs) are nowadays frequently applied to a variety of organisms. Despite of some drawbacks these methods have several unique features that facilitate their superior use in specific applications.

They are mainly used in phylogeography, phylogenetics of closely related species, hybridisation studies, studies of clonal plants and population studies. Plenty of statistical approaches have been developed for binary data, some of which are summarised in this paper.

Keywords

• AFLP
• clonality
• hybridisation
• ISSRs
• PCR-RFLP
• phylogeography
• population genetics
• RAPD
• software