Construction and characterization of bacterial artificial chromosome library of black-handed spider monkey (Ateles geoffroyi).

The large-insert genomic DNA library is a critical resource for genome-wide genetic dissection of target species. We constructed a high-redundancy bacterial artificial chromosome (BAC) library of a New World monkey species, the black-handed spider monkey (Ateles geoffroyi). A total of 193 152 BAC clones were generated in this library. The average insert size of the BAC clones was estimated to be 184.6 kb with the small inserts (50-100 kb) accounting for less than 3% and the non-recombinant clones only 1.2%. Assuming a similar genome size with humans, the spider monkey BAC library has about 11x genome coverage. In addition, by end sequencing of randomly selected BAC clones, we generated 367 sequence tags for the library. When blasted against human genome, they showed a good correlation between the number of hit clones and the size of the chromosomes, an indication of unbiased chromosomal distribution of the library. This black-handed spider monkey BAC library would serve as a valuable resource in comparative genomic study and large-scale genome sequencing of nonhuman primates.