The Rutgers Mapping Resources

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DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Genetic linkage maps continue to play a critical role for gene mapping studies in humans and other organisms. Radiation hybrid maps are also playing an important role in the genome projects of several animal species. The Rutgers Mapping Resources are a unique collection of software programs, maps, and web applications designed to facilitate the construction and dissemination of several types of genomic maps. The Rutgers Mapping Resources include the MultiMap/CRIMAP program, the Rutgers Gombined Linkage- Physical Map, and the MAP-O-MAT web-based mapping server. MultiMap automates and facilitates the construction of linkage and radiation hybrid maps. The Rutgers Combined Linkage-Physical Map is the most comprehensive linkage map available to date, and is novel in that it incorporates both meiotic recombination map data as well as sequence-based positional information. MAP-O-MAT is a web-based server with data and applications for automated linkage mapping of human polymorphic markers, and is our mechanism for dissemination of the Rutgers Maps. These resources have served, and continue to serve, an important role in the international genetics research community, for studies in humans as well as other species. The basis for this claim comes from the numerous citations of our resource publications, many strong letters of support from current users, tallies of hits to our WWW/FTP sites, and the frequent and varying e-mail inquiries we receive. The Rutgers Mapping Resources have been used to help localize disease genes for many inherited genetic disorders with significant health impact. Under this proposal we will continue to develop these important resources in order to enhance and maintain their utility for investigators studying humans and other species. In particular, we propose to implement an interpolation method for placing physically-mapped markers onto our combined linkage-physical map, a feature which has growing importance as high-throughput genotyping technologies continue to advance. We will apply our combined-mapping procedure to data from the genome projects of non-human species such as mouse, rat, dog, and others. We will improve our MAP-O-MAT web server and develop a stand-alone shareable version. We will enhance our documentation, online help, and create useful new tutorials for all of our resources. We will also improve our resource integration and continue to maintain these resources while providing excellent user support. We remain fully committed to keeping all of our software and resources freely available. Our proposal is submitted under PAR-05-057 "Continued development and maintenance of software," which aims to "support the continued development, maintenance, testing and evaluation of existing software."