Primers for EPIC amplification of intron sequences for fish and other vertebrate population genetic studies

generally polymorphic and sometimes hypervariable; they are expected to be codominant and selectively neutral; they are easily amplifiable by PCR, and they can be revealed on simple agarose or acrylamide gels; and large numbers can be obtained at low cost (3−8). Using a given pair of primers, several loci can be simultaneously amplified. This phenomenon may reflect former polyploidizations, tandem duplications, and other phenomena occurring during lineage evolution and producing pseudogenes. This intron characteristic is useful for biologists because it potentially provides a number of polymorphisms with only a pair of primers. The universality property of the primers described has a slight surmountable disadvantage: the risk of human DNA contamination. It is not always possible to avoid contamination by respecting usual PCR rules but it is easily detectable because of the highly specific profiles obtained for each species and for each exon-primed