CONCLUSIONS
We have presented Micro-Primers, a novel, portable and simple pipeline
for microsatellite search and primer design. To the best of our
knowledge, this is the first pipeline that is able to completely
automatize the process, allowing any researcher to make a fast
characterization of a species based on a multi-individual sample prior
to any extensive genotyping. Since it is implemented in Python, it is
portable enough to be used in any kind of operating system, such as
Windows, Linux or MacOs. Micro-Primers also has a design simple enough
that can be easily implemented in any kind of language, or included
within any kind of library or complex software system.
Experimental results showed that Micro-Primers takes about 2 minutes to
execute an entire analysis, using just a single core of an Intel i7
Octa-Core processor with 64 Gbytes of main memory while the manual
execution took around 24 hours for the entire analysis. We have checked
the accuracy of Micro-Primers, by confirming that the results from both
procedures were similar.