CONSTRUCTION OF A CHIMPANZEE GENETIC MAP FOR CHROMOSOME 20

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This subproject is one of many research subprojects utilizing the resources provided by a Center grant funded by NIH/NCRR. The subproject and investigator (PI) may have received primary funding from another NIH source, and thus could be represented in other CRISP entries. The institution listed is for the Center, which is not necessarily the institution for the investigator. Recombination is a fundamental biological process about which we still know very little, especially in primates. Understanding the recombination process is of practical importance for the identification of disease genes in humans, as well as for evolutionary inference about humans and primates more generally. Large-scale recombination rates can be estimated by comparing physical and genetic maps, and while we now have a draft of the complete chimpanzee genome, very little is known about the genetic map for this species. In an effort to create a first genetic map for one chimpanzee chromosome and compare it to the physical map, we started a large scale collaborative program, involving scientists from the U.S. and Europe, and from the major chimpanzee holding facilities. We are addressing a number of topical questions, including: How do recombination rates vary along the chromosome and between males and females? How similar are rates between humans and chimpanzees? Our goal is to genotype over 80,000 single nucleotide polymorphisms across the genome using a custom-design Nimblegen array, allowing us to infer recombination locations with very high spatial resolution. As a pilot project, we have resequenced amplicons across the pseudo-autosomal regions in 32 unrelated chimpanzees, in order to infer fine-scale recombination rates from linkage disequilibrium data.