MODELING INTERFERENCE IN GENETIC-RECOMBINATION

In analyzing genetic linkage data it is common to assume that the loca tions of crossovers along a chromosome follow a Poisson process, where as it has long been known that this assumption does not fit the data. In many organisms it appears that the presence of a crossover inhibits the formation of another nearby, a phenomenon known as ''interference .'' We discuss several point process models for recombination that inc orporate position interference but assume no chromatid interference. U sing stochastic simulation, we are able to fit the models to a multilo cus Drosophila dataset by the method of maximum likelihood. We find th at some biologically inspired point process models incorporating one o r two additional parameters provide a dramatically better fit to the d ata than the usual ''no-interference'' Poisson model.