Efficient and accurate construction of genetic linkage maps from noisy and missing genotyping data

Abstract

We introduce a novel algorithm to cluster and order markers on a genetic linkage map, which is based on several theoretical observations. In most cases, the true order of the markers in a linkage group can be efficiently computed from the minimum spanning tree of a graph. Our empirical studies confirm our theoretical observations, and show that our algorithm consistently outperforms the best available tool in the literature, in particular when the genotyping data is noisy or in case of missing observations. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.