An effective procedure for DNA isolation and voucher recovery from millimeter-scale copepods and new primers for the 18S rRNA and cytb genes

Primers available for the nuclear 18S rRNA gene and the mitochondrial cytochrome oxidase b (cytb) gene are known not to work for many harpacticoids. We therefore designed primers that would amplify and sequence an ~ 750-base-pair fragment of the 18S rRNA gene and others that would amplify and sequence an ~ 450-base-pair fragment of the cytb gene. Both primer sets worked for at least 12 harpacticoid families.