Toward a unified approach to genetic mapping of eukaryotes based on sequence tagged microsatellite sites.

The genomes of all eukaryotes appear to contain a special class of loci, termed microsatellites, which can serve, if sequenced and taken as the substrate for the polymerase chain reaction, as highly informative, locus-specific markers. By analogy to the "sequence tagged sites" recently proposed by Olsen et al. for standardizing the human physical gene map, these microsatellite markers are termed "sequence tagged microsatellite sites" (STMS). Genetic maps based on STMS will share with the Olsen physical maps the advantage that mapping vocabularies will be standardized to the DNA sequence base and that access to any particular locus will not require shipping or storing cloned probes. The species map will consist simply of a listing of nucleotide sequences. Reference populations for developing STMS maps can be chosen on the basis of biological or economic interest. It will not be necessary to maximize for genetic divergence.