“…SSRs play a crucial role in genetic evaluations across various bivalve species, such as Ruditapes philippinarum (Tan et al, 2020;Zheng et al, 2023), Crassostrea gigas (Kochmann et al, 2012;Lallias et al, 2015;Angles d'Auriac et al, 2017;Liang et al, 2023), Argopecten irradians (Campanella et al, 2007;Hemond and Wilbur, 2011), Meretrix meretrix (Gu et al, 2015;Ye et al, 2020), Meretrix petechialis (Xu et al, 2020), among others. In addition, the mitochondrial DNA Cytochrome c Oxidase subunit I (COI) gene, which encodes a protein in mtDNA (Liu and Zhou, 2017), is extensively utilized as a molecular genetic marker in the genetic analysis of bivalve species (Stoeckle et al, 2017;Zheng et al, 2019;Feng et al, 2020;Yi et al, 2021). By employing multiple molecular markers, including mtDNA COI, Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms (SNPs), and SSRs, researchers have investigated the population genetic structure of hard clams from North America and Tokyo Bay, Japan.…”