Molecular genetic methods for mapping disease genes.

Recent technological enhancements in molecular genetics have significantly improved our ability to locate disease genes by linkage analysis. Despite the introduction of molecular methods such as PCR and the discovery of highly polymorphic SSRs, genotyping is still rate-limiting for localizing disease genes by linkage. These methods have been, until recently, highly technical, time-consuming, and expensive. The challenge of mapping the major genes that render one susceptible to environmentally initiated lung disorders such as asthma will require efficient and highly accurate methods of genotyping. We have shown that genotyping by semi-automated fluorescence-based techniques is both highly accurate and efficient. These methods may improve productivity by more than an order of magnitude and can be easily adapted to most linkage studies.