Linkage of cystic fibrosis to two tightly linked DNA markers: joint report from a collaborative study.

A collaborative study involving seven research groups provided an opportunity to investigate the linkage relationships between cystic fibrosis and two DNA marker loci, MET and pJ3.11 (D7S8), on an extended sample of 211 tested families. The maximum lod scores, recombination estimates, and confidence upper bounds (in parentheses) were 91.0 at theta = .004 (.012) for CF and MET, 71.3 at theta = .003 (.011) for CF and D7S8, and 69.3 at theta = .018 (.036) for MET and D7S8. Three-locus analyses yielded best support for the order MET-CF-D7S8, with odds against the alternate orders CF-MET-D7S8 and CF-D7S8-MET of 9:1 and 161:1, respectively. However, the number of observed recombinants was small and only one of the recombinants was jointly informative for all three markers. Significant allelic association was found between CF and both MET and D7S8. Weaker association between the latter two loci is consistent with the order MET-CF-D7S8.