There is no author summary for this article yet. Authors can add summaries to their articles on ScienceOpen to make them more accessible to a non-specialist audience.
Abstract
<p class="first" id="d9123482e59">Results from physical mapping projects have recently
been reported for the genomes
of Escherichia coli, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, and Caenorhabditis elegans, and similar
projects are currently being planned for other organisms. In such projects, the physical
map is assembled by first "fingerprinting" a large number of clones chosen at random
from a recombinant library and then inferring overlaps between clones with sufficiently
similar fingerprints. Although the basic approach is the same, there are many possible
choices for the fingerprint used to characterize the clones and the rules for declaring
overlap. In this paper, we derive simple formulas showing how the progress of a physical
mapping project is affected by the nature of the fingerprinting scheme. Using these
formulas, we discuss the analytic considerations involved in selecting an appropriate
fingerprinting scheme for a particular project.
</p>