A COMPREHENSIVE HUMAN LINKAGE WITH CENTIMORGAN DENSITY

In the last few years there have been rapid advances in developing gen etic maps for humans, greatly enhancing our ability to localize and id entify genes for inherited disorders. Through the collaborative effort s of three large groups generating microsatellite markers and the effo rts of the 110 CEPH collaborators, a comprehensive human linkage map i s presented here. consists of 5840 loci, of which 970 are uniquely ord ered, covering 4000 centimorgans on the sex-averaged map. Of these loc i, 3617 are polymerase chain reaction-formatted short tandem repeat po lymorphisms, and another 427 are genes. The map has markers at an aver age density of 0.7 centimorgan, providing a resource for ready transfe rence to physical maps and achieving one of the first goals of the Hum an Genome Project-a comprehensive, high-density genetic map.