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Genetic Structure Of East Antarctic Populations Of The Moss Ceratodon Purpureus, L. J. Clarke, D. J. Ayre, Sharon A. Robinson

Sharon Robinson

The capacity of the polar flora to adapt is of increasing concern given current and predicted environmental change in these regions. Previous genetic studies of Antarctic mosses have been of limited value due to a lack of variation in the markers or non-specificity of the methods used. We examined the power of five microsatellite loci developed for the cosmopolitan moss Ceratodon purpureus to detect genetically distinct clones and infer the distribution of clones within and among populations from the Windmill Islands, East Antarctica. Our microsatellite data suggest extraordinarily high levels of variation reported in RAPD studies were artificially elevated by …