Use of the IGF BAC library for physical mapping of the Arabidopsis thaliana genome

In order to generate a physical map of the Arabidopsis thaliana genome base d on bacterial artificial chromosome clones (BACs), an iterative high throu ghput hybridisation strategy was applied and its efficiency was evaluated. Thus, probes generated from both ends of 500 BAC clones selected from the A rabidopsis-IGF-BAC library were hybridised to the entire library gridded on high density filters. The 1000 hybridisation reactions identified 4496 clo nes (41.8% of the complete library, or 50.3% if organellar, centromeric, an d ribosomal DNA carrying clones are excluded) which were assembled into a m inimum of 220 contigs. These results demonstrate the viability of the appli ed 'double-end clone-limited/sampling without replacement' hybridisation st rategy for the generation of a high resolution physical map, and provide a highly useful resource for map-based gene cloning approaches and further ge nome analysis.