Structural Genome Analysis Using Molecular Cytogenetic Techniques

Abstract

Knowledge of the physical organisation of DNA sequences within the genome is critical for the understanding of genome structure and function. Classical cytogenetic methods rely on karyological landmarks that may be more or less informative depending on the chromosomal distribution of banding patterns. Because the frequency of such bands generally depends on the distribution of repetitive sequences in the genome, chromosome identification is often extremely difficult in plant species with genomes containing little repetitive DNA. The prime example in this respect is Arabidopsis thaliana, where surprisingly little is known about the physical chromosome structure (Fransz et al. 1998; Heslop-Harrison 1998) in comparison to the enormous amount of information now available from Arabidopsis genome analyses using molecular markers and sequences (Meinke et al. 1998; Kaul et al. 2000).