GENOME MAPPING BY RANDOM ANCHORING - A DISCRETE THEORETICAL-ANALYSIS

As a part of the international human genome project, large-scare genom ic maps of human and other model organisms are being generated. More r ecently, mapping using various anchoring (as opposed to the traditiona l ''fingerprinting'') strategies have been proposed based largely on m athematical models. In all of the theoretical work dealing with anchor ing, an anchor has been idealized as a point on a continuous, infinite -length genome. In general, it is not desirable to make these assumpti ons, since in practice they may be violated under a variety of actual biological situations. Here we analyze a discrete model that can be us ed to predict the expected progress made when mapping by random anchor ing. By virtue of keeping all three length scales (genome length, clon e length, and probe length) finite, our results for the random anchori ng strategy are derived in full generality, which contain previous res ults as special cases and hence can have broad application for plannin g mapping experiments or assessing the accuracy of the continuum model s. Finally, we pose a challenging nonrandom anchoring model correspond ing to a more efficient mapping scheme.