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.