Hello,
I work in the field of evolutionnary ecotoxicology and I have this SNP in my dataset that is quite weird : this marker is always homozygous.
It is supposed to be a nuclear marker since it was picked on 454 sequence alignements of expressed RNA (from yellow perch). The sequence that surrounds this marker was blasted online and it does'nt correspond to any mitochondrial sequence available online. Furthermore, I tried to align this same sequence on a full lenght yellow perch mitochondrial DNA sequence and it does'nt align...
Of course, this could be due to mis-priming. The primer designed to genotype this marker (Kaspar technology; KBiosciences) could be not specific enough and hybridize on mitochondrial sequences instead. The thing is, I have 2 known mitochondrial markers in my dataset and they covary together (they behave like a haplotype, like you would expect) but they don't covary with this bizzare homozygous locus... So unless this locus is defining two supplementary mitochondrial haplotypes (wich, I believe, is unlikely considering the patterns I see in my data), it can't be mitochondrial.
Any idea of what this locus might be? Anyone knows cases of nuclear markers that are always homozygous? You think this marker is just a case of mis-priming on a locus that defines 2 new mitochondrial haplotypes? Can there be any type of Kaspar technology malfunction that produces this pattern?
Please, give me your thoughts and opinions!