Abstract
The sea cucumber Apostichopus japonicus-an endangered species on the IUCN Red List-is economically and ecologically important echinoderm species. Here we describe a set of 21 amplified microsatellites for A. japonicus isolated through biotinylated probes for hybridization and a library screening method, which were used to genotype an artificially propagated stock of sea cucumber offspring from Lianyungang City of China. The observed and expected heterozygosity at the population level ranged from 0.2083 to 0.1000 and 0.6260 to 0.9304, respectively. The number of alleles varied between 6 and 19, and none of the loci deviated significantly from the Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium (P < 0.01). These data might be useful in future analyses of sea cucumber genetic diversity, determination of genetic relationships, and the conservation of genetic resources.