ON GENETIC-MAP FUNCTIONS

Various genetic map functions have been proposed to infer the unobserv able genetic distance between two loci from the observable recombinati on fraction between them. Some map functions were found to fit data be tter than others. When there are more than thr ee markers, multilocus recombination probabilities cannot be uniquely determined by the defin ing property of map functions, and different methods have been propose d to permit the use of map functions to analyze multilocus data. If fo r a given map function, there is a probability model for recombination that can give rise to it, then joint recombination probabilities can be deduced from this model. This provides another way to use map funct ions in multilocus analysis. In this paper we show that stationary ren ewal processes give rise to most of the map functions in the literatur e. Furthermore, we show that the interevent distributions of these ren ewal processes can all be approximated quite well by gamma distributio ns.