PHYSICAL MAPPING OF CHROMOSOME-6 - A STRATEGY FOR THE RAPID GENERATION OF SEQUENCE-READY CONTIGS

The development of radiation hybrid (RH) mapping (Cox et al., 1990) an d the availability of large numbers of STS markers, together with exte nsive bacterial clone resources provided a means to accelerate the pro cess of mapping a human chromosome and preparing bacterial clone conti gs ready to sequence. Our aim is to construct physical clone maps cove ring those regions of chromosome 6 that are not currently extensively mapped, and use these to determine the DNA sequence of the whole chrom osome. We report here a strategy which initially involves establishing a high density framework map using RH mapping. The framework markers are then used for the identification of bacterial genomic clones cover ing the chromosome. The bacterial clones are analysed by restriction e nzyme fingerprinting and STS-content analysis to identify sequence-rea dy contigs. Contig gap closure will also be performed by clone walking .